Leaders - how could they be more interesting?

[BrokenSky]

The elephant in the room here is the tech system. Currently the only real control Players have over getting specific techs are scientist traits. Any system making leaders actually fun to engage with has to either leave that intact or come alongside a fairly hefty overhaul of the science system.

Well there's no reason it couldn't even amplify it if needs be - at the moment each tech has a single tag and different scientist traits boost specifically one tag - why not give techs several tags and make various leader qualities boost different things?

In the example I gave, a politician in engineering might priorities techs with, economy (depending on the guy's ethics - a militarist might boost military techs instead), on practical over theoretical, or specifically on industrial. A pacifist military leader might priorities armor and ship hulls, while a militarist might boost weapons etc.

 

[GloatingSwine]

So I think a big problem with leaders is that they're basically almost completely passive. Apart from Envoys and Scientists on science ships (and maybe like one or two special projects) there's never anything that requires a leader be present in order to make it happen at all, they're just a passive stat stick for whatever they're plugged into. And science ships drop off in the late game because everything is already surveyed.

I don't think "more traits" is the answer, because they're just another flavour of passive stat stick.

So I think the best thing to do is to have fewer leaders that the player needs to worry about, but make them more of an active resource like envoys are.

Anything that the player just plugs in a leader and forgets them until they die just autogenerate them, and replace traits (except ascension traits and special ones like dragonslayer) with ethics which have appropriate bonuses attached where the makeup of leader ethics represents the makeup of pops within your empire (with ones for hive minds which reflect the type of hive mind, so a blank hive gets a generic one but a devouring swarm, determined exterminator, rogue servitor etc. gets a special one).

Then use a system like envoys to manage things like anomaly, archaeology, and special project investigations, which are the current "active" uses for scientist leaders instead of having a science ship parked looking at the site you have one of your more limited set of "investigators" deal with it. (Because since the leader cap was scrapped the opportunity cost of parking a science ship to poke an anomaly with a stick is much much lower than it used to be, except the ones that regularly eat the scientist that you learn to recognise and click no on anyway).

 

[CBR JGWRR]

Well there's no reason it couldn't even amplify it if needs be - at the moment each tech has a single tag and different scientist traits boost specifically one tag - why not give techs several tags and make various leader qualities boost different things?

In the example I gave, a politician in engineering might priorities techs with, economy (depending on the guy's ethics - a militarist might boost military techs instead), on practical over theoretical, or specifically on industrial. A pacifist military leader might priorities armor and ship hulls, while a militarist might boost weapons etc.

This is probably the intention with the field-specific research traits, to represent these aspects.

 

[Morbus Bubbonicus]

I hope devs will make leaders' traits more versalite on par with EUIV where even obviously "bad" traits could be tolerable just because they can earn you some benefit with certain conditions.

 

[Millbot]

I think when envoys were first presented and objections over them not having traits came up. It was either a player or dev that suggested the idea that if they got traits, the traits would impact the diplomatic corps as a whole and not care where you stuck that envoy. So let's say that envoy got a trait that boosted trust gains by 5%. Instead of a setup where you have to specifically put that leader on an empire you want to be friendly with, just having the envoy active would get you that bonus for whatever empires you're cozying up with. I would say the leader need to do something, otherwise there would be too much incentive to hire specific leaders (assuming traits didn't change) and keeping them inactive so they are never at risk and this would, especially, be the case with synth and machine empires from how I understand the malfunction mechanics.

I'll admit it would be less gamey and interactive than the current system, but even just that would be a massive improvement over what we have because the tech scientist interaction is especially tedious. You can get quite a leg up on teching if your willing to shuffle out you research scientists for whoever boosts research speed the most for whatever you are researching. With the only downside being that sometimes you want to park a scientist with a specific trait to increase the odds of getting a desirable tech. Also that you want to memorize the trait rewards for specific dig sites, anomalies, events and precursor secrets for maximum stacking of traits in a way that helps you. Getting traits that don't stuck in the same field on a scientist is never welcome and RNG traits from survey leveling can do that. So yes, current system has depth but depth doesn't always equal good game play and this system is again rather tedious and I'd say even unrewarding to deal with if RNG puts traits where you don't want them or you forgot/didn't realize that something rewarded certain traits.

This also gets into why I suggest leader traits get overhauled to be more than a binary plus or minus stat stick. That way we replace tedious leader shuffling, which we mostly do with scientists, but there is a little of it done with governors and admirals (we don't talk about the waste of space that is generals). With some sort of decision making that is a bit more interesting than, "who gives me the most bonuses." The malus part of the trait forces the player to have to sacrifice something for the bonus and that's a good way to encourage different kinds of gameplay and maybe make it so that "paint the make one color" isn't the best answer by a very long shot for winning the game.

Also need to rethink stuff that consistently or always eats scientists. I've found you can usually get rewards those have or make the gamble worth it, by hiring the cheapest level one scientist available. I admit this gives a whole new meaning tot he eager trait.

 

[GOLANX]

The elephant in the room here is the tech system. Currently the only real control Players have over getting specific techs are scientist traits. Any system making leaders actually fun to engage with has to either leave that intact or come alongside a fairly hefty overhaul of the science system.

Not necessarily a hefty overhaul, you could just add it via policies. You have physics policy a society policy and an engineering policy each that provide your choice of specialization.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Not necessarily a hefty overhaul, you could just add it via policies. You have physics policy a society policy and an engineering policy each that provide your choice of specialization.

It gets messy with things like psionics or rare techs. It's not impossible obviously, and the existing tech system desperately needs an overhaul anyway, I'm just saying it needs to be kept in mind.

So I think a big problem with leaders is that they're basically almost completely passive. Apart from Envoys and Scientists on science ships (and maybe like one or two special projects) there's never anything that requires a leader be present in order to make it happen at all, they're just a passive stat stick for whatever they're plugged into. And science ships drop off in the late game because everything is already surveyed.

I don't think "more traits" is the answer, because they're just another flavour of passive stat stick.

So I think the best thing to do is to have fewer leaders that the player needs to worry about, but make them more of an active resource like envoys are.

Anything that the player just plugs in a leader and forgets them until they die just autogenerate them, and replace traits (except ascension traits and special ones like dragonslayer) with ethics which have appropriate bonuses attached where the makeup of leader ethics represents the makeup of pops within your empire (with ones for hive minds which reflect the type of hive mind, so a blank hive gets a generic one but a devouring swarm, determined exterminator, rogue servitor etc. gets a special one).

Then use a system like envoys to manage things like anomaly, archaeology, and special project investigations, which are the current "active" uses for scientist leaders instead of having a science ship parked looking at the site you have one of your more limited set of "investigators" deal with it. (Because since the leader cap was scrapped the opportunity cost of parking a science ship to poke an anomaly with a stick is much much lower than it used to be, except the ones that regularly eat the scientist that you learn to recognise and click no on anyway).

This is what I'd like honestly. Envoys may be less flavourful than the other leaders at the moment but their limited resource style gameplay is way better than our current uncapped slot machine system. My preferred approach would be to strip out the current trait system entirely then work out how best to add flavour to an envoy style hard cap system.

One advantage of switching to a leader hard cap system is you could remove a lot of the current arbitrary cooldowns or concurrency limits with leader requirements. You can build as many megastructures at once as you like but each one takes up a governor. Relics don't have a shared cooldown but tie up an appropriate leader for 10 years. And so on.

 

[GloatingSwine]

It gets messy with things like psionics or rare techs. It's not impossible obviously, and the existing tech system desperately needs an overhaul anyway, I'm just saying it needs to be kept in mind.

This is what I'd like honestly. Envoys may be less flavourful than the other leaders at the moment but their limited resource style gameplay is way better than our current uncapped slot machine system. My preferred approach would be to strip out the current trait system entirely then work out how best to add flavour to an envoy style hard cap system.

One advantage of switching to a leader hard cap system is you could remove a lot of the current arbitrary cooldowns or concurrency limits with leader requirements. You can build as many megastructures at once as you like but each one takes up a governor. Relics don't have a shared cooldown but tie up an appropriate leader for 10 years. And so on.

Yeah, though a leader cap with the current system doesn’t make for interesting choices.

It didn’t before, you just recruited scientists and governors and ignored the others.

It would need to be used only for leaders we made active use of, which means all the science ship tasks that aren’t basic surveys.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Yeah, though a leader cap with the current system doesn’t make for interesting choices.

It didn’t before, you just recruited scientists and governors and ignored the others.

It would need to be used only for leaders we made active use of, which means all the science ship tasks that aren’t basic surveys.

Not a global leader cap, a cap per leader type. So you have 3 (or whatever) scientists, 2 governors, 2 envoys, etc. Materialists start with an extra scientist or two, militarists get extra military guys. Then they set up a few different things you might want each leader type to be doing and the "game" bit is deciding what's important right now. Like say you don't need a crewed science ship to survey, but they do need to be crewed to research anomalies, but that means less scientists assigned to research (ditch the current massive penalty though). Governors govern sectors but maybe are also needed to colonise a planet. You want your admirals on your fleets but assigning a military leader to a recently captured planet also reduces unrest. The interesting choices come from have X of a leader type but X+Y things you want use then for, and you can't trade governors for scientists any more than you can trade scientists for envoys.

 

[Veras]

- Remove the requirement that you have to manually assign Leaders. All positions will be automatically filled by an auto-generated Leader. You can override this selection to a preferred candidate from a much larger Leader Pool using Influence.

- The Leader pool for Governors / Rulers should be expanded, and should be generated in a random, weighted way based on the characteristics of your worlds. Having a heavy commercial-focus will tend to generate business-type Leaders, for example.

I really like those! Any meaningful implementation of internal politics should make the empire to seem less under you total control than it currently is, something that you need to constantly negotiate with to keep it stable and united, and having leaders to be automatically assigned is an interesting way to do it (while also lessening the micromanaging). It would tie nicely with the forementioned Institutions that the devs want to implement at some point, as something as big and influential as the space fleet will not necessarily be under total control of the empire, having some of its own interests that could be manifested throught the leaders that they put as admirals. It is also a nice opportunity to diversify the gameplay between government type, with democracies having way less control over leaders than totalitarian regimes, for example, but enjoying higher quality leaders to compensate.

- I also firmly believe the Leaders should be generated from real worlds, and have a "homeworld". This could be a dynamic trait that provides them some bonuses based on where they grew up.

This is also very cool and instrumental to the first potential political crisis your empire might face in the mid game: the unbalance of power between the elite born in the homeworld and the emerging leaders from the colonies, that will demand to be treated equally (or sometimes even better, if the colonies are more prosperous than the homeworld) and give you the decision to accept or to deny it, risking the rise of decentralization or even separatist movements.

 

[Bezborg]

I also think that empire leaders should have a very elaborate trait system, the effects of which apply to the entirety of the state, by category/genus of the branch of government.

Give us something to really care about, make the leader election VERY important

 

[CBR JGWRR]

Any form of leader capping is a stupid and unrealistic idea.

Even at our level of 8 billion individuals, the top 0.0001% number into the thousands.

Nothing exists that could stop a Stellaris level civilisation from taking a star, building a Dyson Sphere around it, running computers powerful enough to simulate universes, optimising an entire sub-species of billions to be Leaders of galaxies, then put them through incomprehensibly thorough training simulations until they are perfected.

Even long before that level, they could devote a planet to teaching the lessons of gaining and ruling an empire.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Not a global leader cap, a cap per leader type. So you have 3 (or whatever) scientists, 2 governors, 2 envoys, etc. Materialists start with an extra scientist or two, militarists get extra military guys. Then they set up a few different things you might want each leader type to be doing and the "game" bit is deciding what's important right now. Like say you don't need a crewed science ship to survey, but they do need to be crewed to research anomalies, but that means less scientists assigned to research (ditch the current massive penalty though). Governors govern sectors but maybe are also needed to colonise a planet. You want your admirals on your fleets but assigning a military leader to a recently captured planet also reduces unrest. The interesting choices come from have X of a leader type but X+Y things you want use then for, and you can't trade governors for scientists any more than you can trade scientists for envoys.

For the existing leader types though you can't make them all equally valuable and equally occupied throughout the game, so having individual caps on these leader types just wouldn't work very well. The nice thing about Envoys is that there's basically always something you can be doing with them, and even if you have the most you can possibly have it's hard to have all your interests represented throughout the galaxy and spy on everyone you want to be spying on.

I was more envisioning that the current leader types fade into automation. Every slot where a leader currently goes is replaced with an auto-spawned leader who is generated from a pop somewhere in your empire and has the ethic of that pop at generation, the existing leader traits are done away with and appropriate bonuses are attached to the leaders' ethics instead (eg. an Authoritarian governor will have +slave output and -crime for instance, whereas a Materialist one will have +researcher output).

Their passive bonuses/skill level can be affected by their rank and position as well, eg. you could have fleet leaders spawn at different ranks and levels of capability depending on the biggest ship class in the fleet, army leaders based on the best army in the force, making Titans feel even more like a flagship, have every planet and sector have its own governor where the sector governor applies to the whole sector on top of planet governors. That could hook into future internal politics as well because it's started to generate a natural heirarchy that could be affected by different authority types as these higher level leaders naturally feel like they have more authority.

Then a new leader type sits alongside Envoys and those take over the non-surveying jobs of science ships (anomalies, archaeology, etc), the remaining special projects, research assistance, and any other persistent jobs you can think of to assign them to (like yeah, overseeing megastructure building would be a good one) and those have a limit like envoys tuned to the point that there's always more things to do with them than you have of them.

 

[Critical Ethics]

For the existing leader types though you can't make them all equally valuable and equally occupied throughout the game, so having individual caps on these leader types just wouldn't work very well. The nice thing about Envoys is that there's basically always something you can be doing with them, and even if you have the most you can possibly have it's hard to have all your interests represented throughout the galaxy and spy on everyone you want to be spying on.

Individual caps mean they don't need to be equally valuable. Scientists and military leaders don't need to compete if they're siloed away from each other. But even then:
Scientists are easy, uncap how many scientists can be assigned to passively assist research. So you're always choosing between <something else> and a 5% or whatever research boost.

For governors the passive use would be sector government. Active uses could be things like constructing habitats or megastructures, and for early game make them required for or just beneficial toward colonising new worlds and terraforming.

Military is the tricky one, but merging admirals and generals would help, and having commanded fleets/armies passively gain experience would give you your base use. Active uses... eh, I don't know. Do they need any? Fighting people seems pretty active already.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Any form of leader capping is a stupid and unrealistic idea.

Even at our level of 8 billion individuals, the top 0.0001% number into the thousands.

Nothing exists that could stop a Stellaris level civilisation from taking a star, building a Dyson Sphere around it, running computers powerful enough to simulate universes, optimising an entire sub-species of billions to be Leaders of galaxies, then put them through incomprehensibly thorough training simulations until they are perfected.

Even long before that level, they could devote a planet to teaching the lessons of gaining and ruling an empire.

That's because leaders are an abstraction. Look at end game stellaris. You have what, a half dozen scientists? One governor per sector? One admiral per fleet? Out of the trillions, quadrillions of people in your empire you only need a few dozen named individuals to keep it running at peak efficiency?

It costs 200 energy credits to hire a single leader, and each month they cost a salary of 2 energy. That's enough to feed and clothe hundreds of millions. Their monthly income alone comes to the equivalent of 10s if not 100s of billions of euro. What can, realistically, one individual do that justifies that level of government salary? How can, realistically, putting one specific guy in charge of a single sector immediately result in billions of tonnes of extra minerals being produced?

Leaders are either literally supernaturally gifted beings, or they're an abstract game mechanic with a face and a name to make interacting with your empire feel a little more personal. Neither of these require uncapped leader quantities to feel "realistic".

 

[GloatingSwine]

Individual caps mean they don't need to be equally valuable. Scientists and military leaders don't need to compete if they're siloed away from each other. But even then:

They kinda do though because of the way empires are going to interact with those caps with their ethics. Early advantages compound and leaders are differently valuable in the early and late game. Scientists are early value, governors and admirals mid to late value, generals are no value at any stage.

So if you had invidual leader caps whoever got the scientist cap would be the best and whoever got the general cap would be a sad joke.

Plus a large part of the problem with leaders is that they're boring stat sticks that the player only currently has incentive to interact with because they occasionally have the bad manners to die and just putting caps on them doesn't make that different. That's the idea behind making the player assignable leaders the ones that do the interesting active things.

 

[Liggi]

I really like the idea of making leaders less "specialised", and more representative of the heads of particular departments / institutions.

Your civics, ethics and the way you've built your worlds (ratio of types of buildings / districts / jobs) should provide the basis for the generation of your leader pool. Your leaders are not specialised initially, but can become specialised over time.

Based on your civics, you start with a basic number of "institutions". Some of these institutions sit within government, and are therefore under your control, and some don't, and aren't.

So, let's say you're a Materialist, Xenophile Democracy. You'll start with some institutions representing the basic structure of your Government: research departments, a xeno first contact department, a diplomatic corps, maybe. You have a leader pool and you can assign them to these various departments. There are not separate types of leaders, the only thing that differentiates them is their traits.

Leaders will develop traits over time weighted randomly and by the institution they are assigned to. So, you pick a leader with a military background and you assign them to head the physics department. You're more likely to pull weapons-related tech, and you'll get appropriate bonuses based on that. That leader also has a set of ethics, and since they are a generic leader, they can potentially become your Ruler too. The traits they've accrued over their career so far (based on where you've assigned them) will carry over into their Rulership. This seems better to me as currently you have specific "scientist" characters that often become President in your democracy... this strikes me as odd, how many scientists generally jump from an academic career to politics, and then back again?

You'll also unlock more institutions as you play through the game, probably via tech, and maybe certain requirements like needing a certain number of jobs of a particular type or something like that. There's some precedent for institutions kinda already (ie. the Bureau of Espionage edict).

The thing I like about this is you get a huge amount of freedom to define what your empire is actually like, based on the institutions and leaders you cultivate. The way you build your worlds affects the leaders you get, and the institutions you define allows you to mix and match what you do with them.

So maybe I go heavy on military with the institutions, but I create a lot of commercially-focused worlds. I end up with an empire that's essentially a military-industrial complex, where I have leaders with business / economy-type traits running military institutions and providing unique bonuses to my empire based on that, maybe lower ship upkeep and ship build cost. Or, maybe vice versa, I go for a lot of commercial institutions, but with a lot of stronghold / military academy worlds. So I have an economically-focused set of institutions but with leaders cultivated with military backgrounds. This could provide bonuses like bonuses to military-related research, alloy production.

The combinations / ability to customise could quite literally be endless. And that's before I even start talking about how this could tie into the factions system. But this post is already long enough.

 

[Critical Ethics]

They kinda do though because of the way empires are going to interact with those caps with their ethics. Early advantages compound and leaders are differently valuable in the early and late game. Scientists are early value, governors and admirals mid to late value, generals are no value at any stage.

So if you had invidual leader caps whoever got the scientist cap would be the best and whoever got the general cap would be a sad joke.

Ethics are package deals. If extra generals are worth less than extra scientists then the rest of the materialist and militarist packages need to be adjusted accordingly. Also again I'm proposing merging admirals and generals for just that reason.

Plus a large part of the problem with leaders is that they're boring stat sticks that the player only currently has incentive to interact with because they occasionally have the bad manners to die and just putting caps on them doesn't make that different. That's the idea behind making the player assignable leaders the ones that do the interesting active things.

There's possibly a bit of confusion. I'm not saying switch to the envoy model then bish bash bosh done. I'm saying the worker placement style envoy model is a good, engaging base to work with, so start with that as a core assumption and then start adding fun things to do with it.

Take scientists: once you have the core concept of scientists being a hard capped resource then something requiring a scientist comes with a built in trade off. Now you can start coming up with things that need a tradeoff like that to work properly. Like what if you could pick a tech from the entire list of currently available techs and assign a specific scientist to research it? Or maybe you can assign a scientist to "read old data" and spawn new anomalies in your territory? If getting a new scientist is just a few energy credits then those would be impossible to balance, but if they're a limited resource? Much easier.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Take scientists: once you have the core concept of scientists being a hard capped resource then something requiring a scientist comes with a built in trade off. Now you can start coming up with things that need a tradeoff like that to work properly. Like what if you could pick a tech from the entire list of currently available techs and assign a specific scientist to research it? Or maybe you can assign a scientist to "read old data" and spawn new anomalies in your territory? If getting a new scientist is just a few energy credits then those would be impossible to balance, but if they're a limited resource? Much easier.

Well yeah, we already have that for scientists, anomalies, archaeology, and special projects. They're things that only work if there's a scientist doing them and so having a cap actually matters.

But it's much harder to have a consistent set of those things that works throughout the game for any of the other leader types, and if you don't have that for all of them then you might as well not have the other leader types because the player is not having any interesting interactions with them.

So don't. Just have one new leader type that does Interesting Leader Stuff and automate all the things that are a boring stat stick.

 

[CBR JGWRR]

That's because leaders are an abstraction. Look at end game stellaris. You have what, a half dozen scientists? One governor per sector? One admiral per fleet? Out of the trillions, quadrillions of people in your empire you only need a few dozen named individuals to keep it running at peak efficiency?

It costs 200 energy credits to hire a single leader, and each month they cost a salary of 2 energy. That's enough to feed and clothe hundreds of millions. Their monthly income alone comes to the equivalent of 10s if not 100s of billions of euro. What can, realistically, one individual do that justifies that level of government salary? How can, realistically, putting one specific guy in charge of a single sector immediately result in billions of tonnes of extra minerals being produced?

Leaders are either literally supernaturally gifted beings, or they're an abstract game mechanic with a face and a name to make interacting with your empire feel a little more personal. Neither of these require uncapped leader quantities to feel "realistic".

Why cut down the opportunities for Leaders, when you could expand them?

You could mix the Pops system (which doesn't really represent population suitably) with Leaders, you could expand the government from just Ruler and Sector Governor Leaders to add ministerial positions - it would be a massive opportunity to represent the different governments and governance types far better than changing what Ruler bonuses you have once every so often.

Most of my games usually end up with 50+ Leaders. Hundreds in long running games; my ongoing Prikkiki Ti AAR has 57 Leaders for example, and that's only 2340s. (14 Governors, 20 Scientists, 16 Admirals, 6 Generals, 1 Ruler)

The realism side is because it is totally unrealistic to limit it to as few Leaders as you are suggesting. If we adopted a one world government, it wouldn't be difficult to end up in a situation where the administration could have millions of people who could qualify as Leaders.

An Institutions type system would better suit the restrictions you want to put in.


As an aside, if you only have half a dozen scientists in the endgame, you are playing suboptimally; base numbers at the start of the game are 0.4 research per type per research job for an upfront 200 Energy/100 Alloy and a monthly 2 Energy and miniscule Alloy upkeep. And the numbers only get even more in favour of it from there - putting a Scientist on Assisting Research on an filled out Research Ring World segment and you can boost the total numbers by hundreds of research per month with a single Scientist.

Scientists are easily the most important to get loads of of the Leader types as it stands. Governors are mostly one per sector plus a spare Righteous and Environmental Engineer to slot in for specific situations, while the main issue for Admirals is Stellaris so heavily favours doomstacking at present, so you only get extra Admirals when your fleet is too big for a single Admiral... Generals are a nice idea but the mechanics mean they are ignorable in a lot of ways.