If I ask ignorant, honest questions will I get banned?

[Jorrhast]

>What happens when you destroy all the other races?
They die.
>is that not a victory condition?
Yes but unless you play militarist(not ideology, just way of playing) you probably won't see that victory screen before end-endgame.

>So does the AI present a challenge without cheating?
No. Normal AI could pose a threat to new player in some of 1.x versions, but in 2.x? Just no. Especially in 2.2, with economy rework it's currently doing effectively nothing. I suggest wait and see if it will be fixed.

>Or is it pretty mindless even when playing non-custom races? It shouldn't be that hard for an AI director to scan a custom race and decide on a playstyle even if you purposely try to throw it confusing combinations.
Dude... back then where there were planetary tiles it couldn't even put resource -producing buildings on tiles with corresponding resources. Yes, that's how bad vanilla AI was (mods fixed that atrocity, at least). And it didn't get better.

>How's the tedium? I didn't get a direct answer about how much you have to fight the default game actions in order to micromanage. I don't mind the defaults being not 100% efficient, but when you have to fight them (I heard MoO3 mentioned...), it can get frustrating.
It depends. If you are going for the "tall" build(i.e. not many systems/planets, go hard for science and the like) it would be ok. Wide, though... from what I've read, 2.2 added even more micromanagement. You either have to manage each and every of your planets manually, or put resources into sectors(again, manually each time) so they can build stuff (and hope they won't build something useless).

>Can you board ships and steal them?
No.
e: btw, don't expect some sophisticated space battle system. It all boils down to either countering your opponent loadout or just bringing bigger numbers. There are no special modules, even different computers effectively only add aim/fire rate/evasion bonuses. There is no tactics, it all devolves into furball very fast.
>Is there an espionage system?
No. You even get all info on another empire borders just by contacting them :/
>Does the tutorial go all the way to end game?
No. It's pretty much how to move around, research and build stuff. Basics only.
>Can the game be throttled so it runes well on a potato?
It runs well till midgame-endgame, depending on galaxy size. Then it inevitably slows, to a crawl on a potato.

 

[Brian Bóroimhe]

it has elements from GalCiv and Endless space and Endless Space and Civ5... What happens when you destroy all the other races? is that not a victory condition? I don't mind it being not turn-based, but it still looks 4x to me.

It's not something you'll ever waste your time doing more than once, for the "Suffer not the alien" achievement. You will always reach a stage where there's no point mopping up any further, you know your position is unassailable and you've defeated all challenges. Their games are just built around you deciding when that point is for yourself instead of being told by a box of text that you won.

So does the AI present a challenge without cheating? Or is it pretty mindless even when playing non-custom races? It shouldn't be that hard for an AI director to scan a custom race and decide on a playstyle even if you purposely try to throw it confusing combinations. Modern video games' enemy AI have progressed a lot in 25 years. I expect pacifist builds to be doable. If they weren't, then it shouldn't be an option.

The AI will probably smash you to bits your first few games. It will take a while to learn all of the game's systems and then you start cranking the difficulties up. There are multiple ways to do this as well as just the AI bonus, e.g. larger, sooner end-game crisis. Also a lot of galaxy creation options that really do make a huge difference to how games play out.

Also, regarding custom/non-custom empires, the few preset empires that exist in the game are basically just there for newbies who are afraid to just dive in and create their own race/empire. They won't be appearing as regular enemies or anything. You might get a few familiar names knocking around in a lot of your games because they work off a finite names list after all, but they are randomised species and nations every time.

How's the tedium? I didn't get a direct answer about how much you have to fight the default game actions in order to micromanage.

It's really not too bad. As the game scales from managing a few planets in the early days to potentially hundreds in the late game, tedious micromanagement is a problem the game devs have always tried to avoid. The degree of success in this area is hotly contested by people. But you've already missed the planet tiles system, so that removes what was definitely the worst source of this issue in the game.

Can you board ships and steal them?

No.

Is there an espionage system?

Not yet.

Does the tutorial go all the way to end game?

No.

Can the game be throttled so it runes well on a potato?

Yes

What about at max settings on an overkill gaming rig?

Depends almost entirely on your processor.

 

[Ramiel]

Lot of good answers, guess I'll throw my hat into the mix and share a few more thoughts.

Stellaris was designed and marketed from the getgo as a 4X - Grand Strategy fusion. It's not a pure 4X, but it does share many qualities of one. Pre-release development (unfortunately?) focused very heavily on the 4X aspects of the game since that was something very new to Paradox as a studio. Development since then has focused more heavily on the 'grand strategy' aspects of the game, which can help explain why reactions to some of the changes have been so polarized.

As others have said, one of the more grand-strategy aspects of the game is the ending - there are victory conditions, but they were pretty much just tacked on for the 4X crowd. The game isn't really designed with victory conditions in mind, it simply ends whenever you think it's over. All Paradox's other GS games are historical-based within a set timeframe, so they simply end when the end date is reached. Stellaris doesn't have that historical context, so there's no set 'end date' - making the actual end of the game much murkier and ultimately up to personal opinion. (Well it kinda has one now - 2.2 has changed the old victory conditions (exterminate all others or own X% of inhabitable worlds) into a score-based victory that kicks in automatically at 2500. But you can still keep playing after that if you want.) Dev team has talked about how they've thought of completely redoing the victory system to have more modular or unique victory conditions, perhaps even a system where different empires can all independently 'win' by achieving their own goals (which may differ radically between empires). But there's far more pressing areas of the game to work on first.

There used to be 'free movement' with FTL - the game originally had 3 FTL methods, each with its own perks and drawbacks. It was a fantastic idea, but unfortunately had numerous issues and proved impossible to design and balance around. Was replaced this past February (2.0) with the current hyperlane-only system, to much controversy. Read all about it in the stickied thread if you want. So yeah, normally ships will be bound to the hyperlanes for 99% of the game. There's the aforementioned wormholes (generated at start, essentially like hyperlanes connecting far-flung systems) and Gateways (lategame structures that allow instant travel between any two in the galaxy - assuming you have open borders. Can't use an enemy's gateway for a sneak attack). And there's late-game Jump Drive, allowing ships and fleets to jump to any system in range - great for tactical maneuvers, but you have to be careful as the ships receives a large combat debuff for some time after jumping. Also an early-game tech allowing Science ships to bypass hyperlanes (very slowly) so you can keep exploring even if blocked off.

Lots has been said about the AI, and I really don't have much to add. It's always been a weaker aspect of Stellaris - it started getting pretty good around. 1.8~1.9, but then 2.0 hit and with the drastically changed mechanics came a redone, once again weaker AI. Same thing's true again with the release of 2.2 two weeks ago. The good news is the dev team has a good track record of making slow but steady progress on the AI (as well as bugfixes, performance issues, balance, QoL improvements, etc etc). Paradox's main games always need a few weeks after a big update launches to get cleaned up, and the project manager has said they've budgeted a hefty amount of extra time for 2.2 post-release support. Wouldn't be surprised if the team is working on it all the way till February.
In the meantime I've heard a ton of good things about Glavius' AI mod, though I've yet to try it myself. Maybe soon.

Micromanagement in 2.2. That depends on how anal and perfectionist you are about it. If you're trying to make sure that every single pop is in the perfectly optimal job for their traits on every planet, you're gonna be in for a very, very rough time. But if you're willing to let some inefficiency slide and focus on the big picture - like an actual ruler would - then it's not really an issue at all. It may take time, but pops will tend to take their optimal jobs from less-suited individuals eventually. You'll have a little unemployment here, a little overcrowding there, but it's not a major issue. Just keep an eye on the outliner and take care of serious issues when needed. It is very, very possible (and actually kinda easy, once you really learn the new mechanics) to build a strong, robust economy without sweating the small details.
Governors for sectors do exist, but I hear their AI is as bad (maybe worse) than the empire AI. Haven't touched them myself, have yet to feel the need to. They're completely optional and off by default. Presumably they'll get a lot better as the AI improves/sectors get more character.

Hardware and Performance - Processor's the only thing that really matters for Stellaris (and all Paradox GS games). I used to play it on a Core 2 Duo 2.7 GHz processor from 2009, well well below the minimum specs. Graphics to minimum, had to stick to small galaxies and pull various tricks with the game settings to maximize performance (fewer empires, reduced habitable worlds, etc) but it was very much playable (for me, opinions may vary). Now I have a brand-new rig built this spring with a i7 8700k at 4.7 GHz. Plays the largest galaxy size perfectly at max speed - until the endgame at least, and even then the lag is hardly noticeable. (Well, there's a bug right now with gateways and trade routes causing massive stuttering lag in the endgame, but that's already identified and soon to be fixed. I've just turned off gateways until then).

And finally, a few notes on Stellaris's development cycle, just FYI, so you can know what to expect in the future. Stellaris has two main categories of DLC, Expansions and Story Packs, each of which is released alongside a corresponding free patch/update. (There's also Cosmetic DLC, but that's made by the art team and may or may not be alongside an update). Expansions (and corresponding update) are focused on major aspects of the game; Story Packs on smaller, more focused areas; the two alternate in a not-quite-yearly cycle (so far at least). Major expansions include Utopia/1.5 'Banks' Update (Apr 2017, internal affairs and development), Apocalypse/2.0 'Cherryh' Update (Feb 2018, warfare/borders and FTL changes), and Megacorp/2.2 'Le Guin' Update (Dec 2018, focused on economy). Story packs include Leviathans/1.3 'Heinlein' Update (Oct 2016, space encounters), Synthetic Dawn/1.8 'Capek' Update (Sep 2017, machine empires), and Distant Stars/2.1 'Niven' Update (May 2018, space exploration and more encounters).
Technically nothing has been confirmed about future plans, but based on what devs have said in the past, what's been done already, and what still needs major work in the game, it's universally assumed that the next big update/expansion combo will focus on Diplomacy (and I hope some politics, both internal and external). I wouldn't expect it until probably Fall 2019 though, with a story pack sometime in Late Spring. There's many other things that have been talked about eventually being done - Espionage is a big one. There's all sorts of cool things both devs and players have talked about wanting to see - cloaking devices, non-organic beings (silicoids, energy beings), nomadic nations, sector politics and rebellions/civil wars, organic ships and technology, etc. And I'm sure most of it will make it in eventually, but gotta finish the core mechanics and polish stuff like the AI first.

Wow, this turned out waaay longer than I expected. Ah well. Any more questions, just feel free to ask!

 

[LWE]

In 2.2, there is a score victory condition now, which was actually a factor in me buying the game.

 

[LeSingeAffame]

"I have to have some measure of freedom of speech to reference these things in order to get my basic questions answered"
Ehm
No?
That's PI's forum, they could ban you because they don't like the order in which you arrange your items owned that there isn't much you'd be able to do
They won't (or at least tell us in advance plox mods ), but you don't have much protection around here

As for other sources of information, the wiki is currently being updated, though it takes quite some time since 2.2 changed everything again, but it's updated very frequently. And to be honest, we all had to use the good old "try something, fail horribly, try again, get smacked down, try again, finally survive!" when we first learned the game

 

[WhapXI]

The whole

I have to have some measure of freedom of speech to reference these things in order to get my basic questions answered

thing makes this whole line of questioning comes across a certain kind of way. Like it's some kind of sovereign citizen, freeman-on-the-land nonsense. If you have questions about the game then you're welcome to ask them. If you have questions not about the game, take them to the appropriate off-topic forum. You don't have any intrinsic freedom of speech because this is a website owned by a company for commercial purposes, but they're very lenient about what you can say. Check out the rules of conduct. As long as you aren't harassing anyone, doxxing anyone, or literally doing something illegal, you're fine to say whatever. Critique about the games is more than allowed as long as you aren't a raging troll.

With regards to your questions, they're obviously pretty in depth. You seem to have a strong idea of what you want and -by the sounds of it- expect from a space 4X. Stellaris will probably delight in many ways and disappoint in many others. Rather than ask a bunch of the games most passionate players (positively and negatively) for objective advice, I recommend you do some independent research. Watch some more LPs and some tutorials. Right now this post comes off like a strangely hostile job interview for a job that nobody applied for. A lot of what you're asking can't be answered objectively. You're gonna end up with a lot of opinions, biased one way or another.

As you can see I have a very long memory when it comes to video games. Remember that.

lmao cool will do my dude

 

[Ezumiyr]

You'll find the answers to most of your questions by doing a little research on Stellaris wiki and Google, just like you could easily find the answer for your initial question on the forums. That whay you'll save a lot of time and won't need to constantly explain "it's not an insult but..." "you have the right to not answer me..." etc.

Are you new to the internet or what? Looks almost like you're trying to troll...

 

[ShouldIBuy]

Thank you guys for the candid replies (except the last three, perhaps they didn't read the rest). LWE, your little tidbit is exactly the kind of thing I won't easily find without digging through wikis and anticipating that a "victory condition" search will actually have a search result. But man Ramiel, that was the kind of depth I was hoping for. Thanks for explaining why there is such disagreement in the community over the 4x title, and specifically victory conditions. I'm fine with just having booleans that you can enable or not so that you can force a death match or allow a science victory or whatever. What are the more pressing areas of the game that need to be worked on first? Since you seem to have a good idea of the history, why was Stellaris published when it was so incomplete? I'm fine with this, but I thought I'd ask. Did it first come out as an alpha like Rimworld?

The FTL stickied thread has no edited OP (as I'd expect for an important resource). Its a hundred and fifty pages long... The wiki has this for 2.0 https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Category:2.0 which doesn't tell me anything about what changed in, well, version 2.0. The patches don't mention an FTL change https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Patches and searching for a more in depth change log gives me this: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/...angelog&searchToken=ccc6rnl15dzuph1n11fdkr2fu ... nevermind the 2.0 patch notes do have a separate page: https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Patch_2.0https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Patch_2.0 but they don't say what was there before only warp travel isn't a thing anymore (a search redirects to a page without any other hits for the string 'warp travel' https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/Physics_research#Warp_Travel ) and that wormholes can't be used (which contradicts this the main ftl page https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/FTL . Hopefully this is enough dilligence to show why I'm asking off the wall questions since research of the Stellaris wiki and Google don't easily give answers to these kinds of questions, especially compared to someone as knowledgeable about this as yourself. So can I get the short version of what FTL used to work like? Just curious.

If you're trying to make sure that every single pop is in the perfectly optimal job for their traits on every planet, you're gonna be in for a very, very rough time. But if you're willing to let some inefficiency slide and focus on the big picture - like an actual ruler would - then it's not really an issue at all.

Hehe. I'm more the first time, but mainly because I'm used to 4x's with empire-wide views that allow a quick scan of what has changed and therefore what might need adjusting. It's a bit masochist and a little slower but it stays close to 100% optimal all the time with little effort.

Processor's the only thing that really matters for Stellaris

That's exactly what I want to hear. I have all the power I could ever want there, but I'm wary of games that run my 8GB GPU hot.

There's all sorts of cool things both devs and players have talked about wanting to see - cloaking devices, non-organic beings (silicoids, energy beings), nomadic nations, sector politics and rebellions/civil wars, organic ships and technology, etc. And I'm sure most of it will make it in eventually, but gotta finish the core mechanics and polish stuff like the AI first.

Well, as long as they are still getting paid to expand it, that's great. It makes me curious if there is a cutoff date or if they are more of a 'it will be done when it's done' sort of studio. I prefer the latter, although there is little any individual customer can do to influence that. Do you personally expect a 'here's a crushingly competent ai' patch to come after espionage/politics? Or do you think that's just going to be left to modders to fix?

 

[Azhcristokos]

Paradox is very much a “it’ll be done when it’s done...in a few years” kind of developer for its major titles. CK2 was released in 2012 and is supposedly just nearing the end of its cycle. Hopefully they’ll finally polish it up one last time and then do CK3.

Some players have personal cutoff points beyond which they either refuse to let the game update or stop buying any more DLC. I’m at the latter point with EUIV.

 

[Duuk]

You're pretty new to Paradox games apparently.

Paradox releases the base game and then every 6 months or so releases a DLC/expansion. Along side that expansion comes a free patch that includes a major update to the base game.

The best way to think about ANY Paradox game is like an MMO. The game itself gets updates on a regular basis, so the "1.0" version isn't really "unfinished", it's fully playable and "complete", but it's going to be a fully different game in a year or 2.

Saying that Crusader Kings 2 wasn't a "full game" in 2012 or whatever when it released would be wrong. It was. But with something like $350 worth of (at retail price) expansions and DLC over the last 6 years it (might be?) is likely coming to the end of its cycle and is a VERY different game than it was 6 years ago.

 

[DominusNovus]

Regarding the various changes, as documented on the wiki, I would avoid getting hung up on what the game was like in 2.1, 2.0, 1.8, etc. Just take any articles that doesn’t have the little ‘this page is up to date as of 2.2’ flag in the corner with a grain of salt.

That said, the wiki gets updated very fast. I was impressed with how much 2.2 info there was immediately after release.

 

[Kent_Lang]

@ShouldIBuy
The FTLs used to have hyperlanes which works much like they do now, jump drives that could jump to any system within a certain radius from it's location and wormhole generators that could do the same thing as jump drives, only at greater range and you had to build them first. Personally I always thought hyperlanes was the weakest of the three but Paradox insisted that both warp drives and wormhole generators borked the performance. Whenever they were balanced or not weren't really a question as you could force all races to use one FTL type if you wished. They also changed how the borders worked. Before the borders reached from a star station or a planet in a radius, gobblng out star systems within its reach, but now the border is the star systems and you have to claim individual star systems to expand. This was probably the direction they choose to go already before they changed the FTL and this was probably what facilitated the change. Of course we didn't know that at the time and the change was hugely controversial!

I'll confirm the specs as I can run this on my HP ENVY SPECTRE 14 laptop from 2012 at early game. However the performance tends to degrade as time goes on and it's not a lot we can do about it as it seems to be once again related to faulty path-finding. It's funny because I saw once looking at jobs at Paradox that part of their public recruitment test was to path find.

Personally I don't think that the devs will ever include a great AI and the devs seem to be almost on Toady (Tarn Adams) levels on the subject of game development, probably going to keep develop their games until they get bored of them or the game is largely abandoned by the community. I mean just look at how long CK2 has survived!

Stellaris was never in alpha like Rimworld and it wasn't incomplete at launch. They don't develop because the games are incomplete, they develop because they think of new stuff to add to the game. In CK2 you can join cults and summon demons for some reason as well as having duels with people and collecting trinkets. There's even an expansion that adds Aztecs invading Europe by 1300. Why? I don't know! I ask myself sometimes... why is that in the game!? How do they even come up with this stuff!? CK2 is awesome btw. strongly recommend. CK2 is a good example here because it was far from incomplete at launch and we don't really need the cults or retinues or horse lords or raging Aztecs (a lot of people turn it off after the novelty wears off) but they added all that stuff anyway.

Stellaris hasn't reached that point yet. Maybe that's because it's also one of their more recent releases, just before HoI4. Also neither the AI or the performance was that bad before this most recent update on Stellaris.

 

[Jorrhast]

So can I get the short version of what FTL used to work like? Just curious.

3 old FTL drives were:
1) Warp drive.
-You can jump to any star in warp range (i.e. there's a circle with a certain radius where anything in it is reachable).
-Can be initiated only from outside of system limit.
-Drives have windup(fast) and cooldown(sloooooow), during cooldown they can't do anything.
-Warping happens at fixed speed, you can't be stopped/intercepted while in warp.
-Better drives reduce windup or cooldown, don't remember, and increase warp speed.
2) Wormhole generators.
-Ships don't have drives per se, instead you build WH stations and they fling your fleets anywhere in the range (again, circle like warp but bigger radius)
-Stations have to spend time to open wormhole; the bigger the fleet, the longer it akes to open. Also opening to hostile/neutral territory takes an additional time (+30% iirc)
-You can build multiple WH stations in one system (they are really cheap)
-WH travel is instantaneous(after WH had been generated) and ignores closed borders (if you have enough radius to jump over closed borders, that is).
3) Hyperdrive. What we were left with. In 1.x you didn't have to travel to hyperlane endpoint to move to designated system, though, it worked from anywhere outside system limit. In some versions it even worked from anywhere in-system.

Obviously, sensors also worked not based on hyperlane jumps but by euclidian distance (i.e. the same circles like warp/WH distance).

Also, jump drives were... different. They had range from wormholes, freedom of movement from warp with only short windup and no cooldown, and from hypedrive they took exactly nothing because it was crap.

 

[Kent_Lang]

Also, jump drives were... different. They had range from wormholes, freedom of movement from warp with only short windup and no cooldown, and from hypedrive they took exactly nothing because it was crap.

From what I remember jump drives were quite fast and hyperdrives was also the fastest FTL type between systems which is why some people swore by it but personally I never found their speed to make up for their lack of mobility. I was really angry at Paradox because I never ever played with Hyperlanes and I abandoned Stellaris for a long time after that.

 

[Jorrhast]

JD were the best, period. They had best points of every 3 types and no drawbacks. Hyperdrive, well... the only thing it had was indeed fast travel between adjacent systems but its overall speed wasn't that good. Imho it was only useful to troll warp/WH players.

 

[JangoBunBun]

Can the game be throttled so it runes well on a potato? What about at max settings on an overkill gaming rig?

Generally Paradox's Grand Strategy Games are more CPU bound than GPU bound, so if you have a powerful CPU that'll help. Their GSGs are also real time with variable speed and pause, so if performance is too low you can slow the game down or pause it as you need to (except in multiplayer, where only the host can do that, and it effects everyone)

 

[Azhcristokos]

Do you personally expect a 'here's a crushingly competent ai' patch to come after espionage/politics? Or do you think that's just going to be left to modders to fix?

To be honest, I doubt there will ever be a patch made to really tackle the AI. It is possible that the next major patch will focus on bugfixing and quality of life updates, in which case the AI will receive some love and care, but it probably won't be enough. Serious improvements to the AI will need everyone's favorite AI mod.

 

[Ramiel]

And others beat me to it a bit, but oh well. I only seem to know so much since I've been following the game closely since it was first announced in what, Sept 2015? Checking the forums practically daily. Almost a bit obsessed. If you can't tell it's easily one of my absolute favorite games. But thanks for the complements anyways.

Didn't realize the stickied FTL thread wasn't organized at all (never looked in myself), so sorry about that bad advice. I think it's more of a containment thread than an information resource anyways.
Initially the game had three mutually exclusive methods of FTL, each with strengths and weaknesses, and with each empire picking one at game start. To skim on the details (fleshed out by others above) you had Warp Drive, fairly slow but with the freedom to travel to any system within a set range; Hyperlanes, pretty much as they are now; and Wormholes, where you constructed stations that created artificial wormholes letting ships instantly jump to and from any system in range (I personally was a wormhole player, loved those things). Natural wormholes and gateways didn't exist until 2.0. This three-FTL system was actually a pretty big feature and selling point during development and at launch, and there are a decent number of people who chose to buy Stellaris over other games for that feature. The decision to switch to Hyperlanes only was not an easy one, and one the dev team spent a lot of time debating and working on before committing to it. The Game Director talked a fair bit about their reasoning in a Dev Diary, which you can check out below.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...y-92-ftl-rework-and-galactic-terrain.1052958/
Oh, and in case you didn't already pick up on this, the Dev Team usually puts out weekly Dev Diaries (on Thursday for Stellaris) talking about what they're working on, presenting teasers, answering some questions, etc. There's none this month thanks to the big update and the holidays, but I'd expect them to start back up in early~mid January. Also our beloved Game Director Wiz (who was originally the AI lead and took over as director right after launch) has just announced he's leaving Stellaris to be director on a secret new project that everyone totally knows is Victoria 3. We will miss him quite dearly.

As for the state of the game on release - who knows. Maybe poor management, maybe higher-ups rushed it to release, maybe their current design model of constant updates/improvements let them be a little complacent about the initial launch. Technically it was a feature-complete game that could stand on its own after the first few bug patches, but in many ways it seemed quite bare-bones. Even so Stellaris was Paradox's most successful game launch ever, and it has continued to set sales records for them ever since. Good thing they have a history of constantly improving their games, even if you never spend a penny on DLC. Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis 4 were both in a similar state when they launched in 2012 and 2014, but they both improved dramatically and are now so full of content they almost feel a bit bloated. I fully expect Stellaris to follow the same path, and in 2020 we'll all look back and think 'wow, look how far this game has come!' With CK2 almost seven years old and still going, and given Stellaris' overall success, I wouldn't be surprised if they keep working on it till 2025.

I highly doubt there'll be an entire patch/expansion dedicated solely to AI improvement, mainly because I don't see what kind of paid DLC expansion you can link to that. That's one of the downsides of their development model; to justify spending large amounts of resources on the free update content (which AI would have to be), there has to be some kind of thematically-linked DLC to go with it. I do however fully expect the AI to steadily get better over time, improving bit by bit with every patch both big and small. We already saw a fairly significant increase in AI capabilities from 1.0 to 1.9, but then the whole thing had to be redone twice for the major overhauls this year. And while the Diplomacy update will probably make similarly significant gameplay changes, I highly doubt it'll be nearly as disruptive to the AI as completely redoing FTL or the economy. I'll be quite surprised if the AI isn't in at least decent shape this time next year, if not in the next couple months.
I really don't get the feeling Paradox is the kind of studio that will leave major issues 'to the modders to fix' (looking at you Bethesda), but they do have limited time and resources, so modders will always get to adding features/improving some areas of the game well before the studio does.

 

[Brian Bóroimhe]

I don't think you're supposed to have that sort of control, your pops are supposed to represent blocks of autonomous people, you can't necessarily order them where to work.

I would add that the ability to forcibly move populations between worlds being locked behind authoritarian ethics supports this.

Also, jump drives were... different. They had range from wormholes, freedom of movement from warp with only short windup and no cooldown, and from hypedrive they took exactly nothing because it was crap.

Your other descriptions were spot on, but this one just cracked me up. So true.

JD were the best, period. They had best points of every 3 types and no drawbacks. Hyperdrive, well... the only thing it had was indeed fast travel between adjacent systems but its overall speed wasn't that good. Imho it was only useful to troll warp/WH players.

The old jump drives really were a thing of true beauty. Getting them (especially psi-jump drives) was such a big thing and such an enormous tactical advantage in subsequent wars. They were hands down the best and they were so much fun.

From what I remember jump drives were quite fast and hyperdrives was also the fastest FTL type between systems which is why some people swore by it but personally I never found their speed to make up for their lack of mobility. I was really angry at Paradox because I never ever played with Hyperlanes and I abandoned Stellaris for a long time after that.

You're both right, hyperplanes were complete shit in comparison to warp and wormhole, never mind jump drives. Frankly it was foolish to choose hyperdrive when all 3 would be present in the galaxy because of the disadvantage it put you at. But that said, I had been finding myself for quite some time before those changes playing mostly hyperplane only galaxies as they led to much better gameplay results (a lesser extent than the 2.0 changes, but in the same direction).
And I think what a lot of people have always ignored when talking about this is the fact that paradox has access to all of the gameplay data analytics and frankly I doubt they would have made these changes if they hadn't already been seeing a lot of people playing a lot of hyperlane only games.
As much as I liked the old FTLs, the game is unquestionably better for now being hyperlane only.

For the record, jump drives are complete shit now. Their crippling cool down penalty means they have a ridiculous niche window of usefulness in slightly reducing internal travel times within your empire in the time between getting them and getting your jump gate network up. Occasionally handy for jumping armies into a system too. But my god they are just pathetic in comparison to the massive game changer they used to be.

 

[Jorrhast]

especially psi-jump drives

Heh, PJD. Also known as "Around the galaxy in 80 days"