Most glaring balance issues and some solutions

[ChiefBigFeather]

This is a list of the most glaring balance issues I found and some solutions that might work to fix them. Please don't derail the thread by whining about bugs, AI or some feature not working the way you like.

Colonies are too good as pop incubators. Proposal: Add a number of colonies pop growth penalty, greatly increase colony admin cap. A value of 10 admin cap per colony would better represent the actual value to overall economy growth the extra pop growth represents.

Research and pops snowball too hard. It is too easy to go way ahead with this. Pops should eat more (or consume more power), there is way too much food anyway. Maybe those percentile bonuses from techs need to be lowered slightly. The growth should be more linear, less exponential.

Exceeding admin capacity doesn't penalize research and unity cost enough. This one is pretty self explanatory.

System admin cap (not colony/district admin cap!) is too high. It doesn't reflect the economical value of most systems at all. A value of 1 seems more reasonable. If that's too low, add 0.1 admin cap per mining station.
As things are now, the permanent snake to valuable systems is the way to go (just stay coherent). That itches my OCD. I would like to have a reason to fill out those 2 energy systems later in the game.

The starting Admin Cap seems too low, bonuses to it too high.

Bonuses to Science output are too high and stack too much. Science is a tier 3 resource, yet there are ways to stack bonuses on this making forge worlds cry with envy. It is quite possible to quadruple the effective science output per pop before 2300. That's way too much snowballing. Quick proposal: Nerf the Intellectual leader trait to +5%, Lower the research assistance bonus. Lower the research bonus leader traits like Spark of Genius across the board.

Mining Guilds is crazy good because it multiplies with every other production bonus. Maybe nerf it to 0.5?

Some leader traits are too good while others are almost useless at the start of the game. Maybe the game should use some sort of point system for this. But I think just balancing the leader traits would help a lot. Expansionist is the worst offender imho, even 10% seems to be on the strong side.

The first two points together really are the biggest offenders.

Edited for clarification. Added point about administration capacity.

 

[Novacat]

Colonies are too good as pop incubators. Proposal: Growth should be (partially?) global, not per colony.

Ehh... That is kind of how it works realistically. The more pops and more space you have, the more growth you will have. 1,000,000 people will grow faster than 100,000 people. Stellaris even goes above and beyond by having steep emigration penalties on older colonies when you establish new ones. The main issue right now is pop growth being heavily tilted towards minorities, which results in even a minor amount of immigration eventually turning the planet into a multicultural mess.

Research and pops snowball too hard. No easy solution to this one but the numbers are too high. Maybe nerf production bonuses from techs to 5%?

No. I do not want a return back to the days when teching was nonviable and the meta was dominated by T1 corvette spam. If someone goes through the massive investment for technology, they should get rewarded for it, especially since technology is no longer a basic resource. A world dedicated to technology is a world that is not dedicated towards alloys or consumer goods.

Maybe increase food/energy requirements for pops?

The main issue I see is food. Food production is both way too high, and food consumption is way too low. There is no reason to build ringworlds as breadbaskets as your normal worlds will be more than enough, even on nutritional plenitude with multiple filled eucamenpoli. I literally cannot get rid of this surplus food fast enough even with thousands of pops.

Many systems are not worth the admin cap, systems are too expensive. Quick proposal: Lower admin cap per system to 1, make every 1 mining stations cost 0.1 admin cap. Maybe just lowering admin cap per system to 1 is enough.

The whole point of admin cap is to give some incentive to not blob mindlessly in every direction. Right now the bulk of your admin cap is going to be taken up by districts which penalizes tall play, so I see no reason to buff wide play even more.

Bonuses to Science output are too high and stack too much. Science is a tier 3 resource, yet there are ways to stack bonuses on this making forge worlds cry with envy. Quick proposal: Nerf the Intellectual leader trait to +5%, Lower the research assistance bonus. Lower the research bonus leader traits like Spark of Genius across the board.

Research and Unity have higher bonuses because going over admin cap will also penalize those two resources. Admin cap does not penalize your alloy or consumer good production.

Some leader traits are too good while others are almost useless at the start of the game. Maybe the game should use some sort of point system for this. But I think just balancing the leader traits would help a lot. Expansionist is the worst offender imho, even 10% seems to be on the strong side.

...it would be nice if you could pick your starting ruler traits. I have a mod for that anyway.


Based on your thread as a whole, I have a pretty clear picture of how your games go.
1: You spend all your alloys and influence claiming everything under the stars. You now have a quarter of the galaxy under your control, but no colonies or military.
2: Your neighbors, who focused more towards balanced growth and colonization, now have a stronger economy, and military, and now you are blocking most of their expansion.
3: Naturally, you have a lot of valuable clay, weak military, and weak economy. Is it any wonder that they declare war on you to seize your clay?
4: You end up dogpiled and divided up between your neighbors.

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

Ehh... That is kind of how it works realistically. The more pops and more space you have, the more growth you will have. 1,000,000 people will grow faster than 100,000 people. Stellaris even goes above and beyond by having steep emigration penalties on older colonies when you establish new ones. The main issue right now is pop growth being heavily tilted towards minorities, which results in even a minor amount of immigration eventually turning the planet into a multicultural mess.

Realistically? You have a population of 12 billion, growing 360 million a month. You send some of them to a new space. Now the same 12 billion grow 720 a month? If you follow that logic, Russia should be the most populated country on earth.

No. I do not want a return back to the days when teching was nonviable and the meta was dominated by T1 corvette spam. If someone goes through the massive investment for technology, they should get rewarded for it, especially since technology is no longer a basic resource. A world dedicated to technology is a world that is not dedicated towards alloys or consumer goods.

Me neither. But there is something in between.

The main issue I see is food. Food production is both way too high, and food consumption is way too low. There is no reason to build ringworlds as breadbaskets as your normal worlds will be more than enough, even on nutritional plenitude with multiple filled eucamenpoli. I literally cannot get rid of this surplus food fast enough even with thousands of pops.

Yeah it is.

The whole point of admin cap is to give some incentive to not blob mindlessly in every direction. Right now the bulk of your admin cap is going to be taken up by districts which penalizes tall play, so I see no reason to buff wide play even more.

I see the reason behind admin cap. But you don't get my argument.
Admin cap taken up by districts is penalizing tall play as much as wide play. This is because wide play is not trying to survive on station resources. That is just not viable in Stellaris at the moment. Wide play is grabbing as many colonies as possible. For this reason, the growth penalty is the way way bigger hindrance for tall play. Admin cap just overly penalizes station focused play.
It would be nice if I could follow my OCD and grab that two energy system which is basically in my borders anyway but certainly not worth 2 admin cap.

Research and Unity have higher bonuses because going over admin cap will also penalize those two resources. Admin cap does not penalize your alloy or consumer good production.

How is this relevant to the argument? I have no problem hitting level V tech without going near admin cap by 2300. It is quite feasible to quadruple research efficiency before midgame.

1: You spend all your alloys and influence claiming everything under the stars. You now have a quarter of the galaxy under your control, but no colonies or military.
2: Your neighbors, who focused more towards balanced growth and colonization, now have a stronger economy, and military, and now you are blocking most of their expansion.
3: Naturally, you have a lot of valuable clay, weak military, and weak economy. Is it any wonder that they declare war on you to seize your clay?
4: You end up dogpiled and divided up between your neighbors.

That's presumptuous. How do you come to the conclusion that I overextend? Did you not get the part where I think grabbing systems is not worth it admin cap wise?

 

[Etrutian]

This is a list of the most glaring balance issues I found and some solutions that might work to fix them. Please don't derail the thread by whining about bugs, AI or some feature not working the way you like.

Colonies are too good as pop incubators. Proposal: Growth should be (partially?) global, not per colony.

Literally the point of colonies.

Research and pops snowball too hard. No easy solution to this one but the numbers are too high. Maybe nerf production bonuses from techs to 5%? Maybe increase food/energy requirements for pops?

The admin negative modifiers are the balance to this. Over a very long period of time, a small number of planets could get ridiculous returns; but if you want immediate return, you need to expand and when you expand your science costs increase.

Maybe they could increase this cost? I can't imagine anyone is exactly lined up for more expansion penalty though.

Many systems are not worth the admin cap, systems are too expensive. Quick proposal: Lower admin cap per system to 1, make every 1 mining stations cost 0.1 admin cap. Maybe just lowering admin cap per system to 1 is enough.

The starting Admin Cap is too low, bonuses to it too high. Maybe double the starting admin cap, half all the bonuses.

This balances out (to a degree) your previous point. Admin cap is low, so population boom from expansion is not overpowered. Admin cap can almost entirely be ignored unless you want to play tall; and tall play has never been more viable because of admin cap. (at least, in my opinion)

Bonuses to Science output are too high and stack too much. Science is a tier 3 resource, yet there are ways to stack bonuses on this making forge worlds cry with envy. Quick proposal: Nerf the Intellectual leader trait to +5%, Lower the research assistance bonus. Lower the research bonus leader traits like Spark of Genius across the board.

If the concern is you are researching things too fast, then the slider exists to increase costs. Yes its a 'use the slider' excuse, but I can't imagine making the game any slower would be a positive thing.

Mining Guilds is crazy good because it multiplies with every other production bonus. Maybe nerf it to 0.5?

Might be valid. Unsure. Mining guilds pre 2.2 was easily a must have. Now I overlook it each game because minerals are already in abundance and I don't consider +1 to be value added. Will re-verify.

Some leader traits are too good while others are almost useless at the start of the game. Maybe the game should use some sort of point system for this. But I think just balancing the leader traits would help a lot. Expansionist is the worst offender imho, even 10% seems to be on the strong side.

I think being able to develop and customize leader traits would be a highly valuable and engaging tool for gameplay.

 

[evilcat]

The technology balance is finally at some interesting point. You can invest in technology and there is a chance it will be useful. There is enough technologies which just give % bonus, not only get technology so you can spend more minerals. If you play tall and focus on technology there is a reward for it.
On the other side, empires are falling under too many research labs, so it is not risk free. And you need to play the game and decide when is the right time for labs and when for forges.

However we may benefit from a couple of technologies giving +% civic goods and alloy production.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Literally the point of colonies.

I understand it is the point of colonies but it is too strong thus unbalanced as it is the only viable way to make a strong economy thus it favor those that can expand fast too much. Plus it is in no way realistic. Population growth do not work like that, especially not in modern term using modern society and technology where food is not really a realistic concern. The only concern is basically energy to sustain the lifestyle and happiness of the people living in whatever place they live.

The economy in Stellaris is based too much on population when energy should be main driver of any economy. You don't need population to build or consume stuff... it is pretty easy to figure out things to do in almost an endless amount of stuff as long as you have energy to supply whatever project you want to sink it into.

Population would mainly be a driving factor for innovation, science and culture in such advanced worlds. Using meat bags for physical labor seem pretty inefficient for societies as advanced as the ones in Stellaris to begin with.

The economy on the game are more like a industrialization level one, even that seem a bit a stretch in terms of productivity and the idea of consumption.

But the thread was not about that but balance and the fact is that growing POP is too important and the most important part of a new colony is farming new POP which is a problem.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

About "Admin Capacity"....

For the most part this system is a joke as implemented. For science and unity it basically don't impact the game you play one bit... while for cost of leaders and edicts it decently follows the development.

I have increased Tech to +1% per Empire Sprawl and Unity at +1.5% (vanilla at +0.2% tech and +0.5% Unity) per empire sprawl (I also changed the Empire Sprawl numbers so systems are only 0.5 now and Population also give a small amount instead).... this at least force you to think and consolidate and actually make Admin Capacity impact the game in a meaningful way. You have to consolidate and make sure both unity and research increase as you grow. Unity also become really hard to snowball in if you grow really large which I think is a good thing.

First of I view technology as how developed your people actually are, how well they can use and incorporate technologies into their societies etc... thus it is more like an education level of the people or in case of hives or machines how developed the drones are to use new systems effectively or at all.

Unity should become more difficult to spread as your empire grow not easier as it now is... so for me this work allot better.

I must say that the AI cope quite well with these changes too, especially with Glavius AI mod it does really well.

 

[Etrutian]

I understand it is the point of colonies but it is too strong thus unbalanced as it is the only viable way to make a strong economy thus it favor those that can expand fast too much. Plus it is in no way realistic. Population growth do not work like that, especially not in modern term using modern society and technology where food is not really a realistic concern. The only concern is basically energy to sustain the lifestyle and happiness of the people living in whatever place they live.

The economy in Stellaris is based too much on population when energy should be main driver of any economy. You don't need population to build or consume stuff... it is pretty easy to figure out things to do in almost an endless amount of stuff as long as you have energy to supply whatever project you want to sink it into.

Population would mainly be a driving factor for innovation, science and culture in such advanced worlds. Using meat bags for physical labor seem pretty inefficient for societies as advanced as the ones in Stellaris to begin with.

The economy on the game are more like a industrialization level one, even that seem a bit a stretch in terms of productivity and the idea of consumption.

But the thread was not about that but balance and the fact is that growing POP is too important and the most important part of a new colony is farming new POP which is a problem.

Population and economy go hand and hand. What exceptions exist in our modern world (UAE, Saudi) are due to their export nature to large populations. Even steel needs a meatbag to keep it going.

From gameplay perspective, you see this represented pretty well. Large populations produce large quantities of stuff. The balance seems to lie in Science and Unity; the more massive you are, the greater the cost to produce is. Energy, being credits, being money is a broad representation of the smoothing of transactions between the population. Not economy itself.

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

Too much growth can actually stifle an economy. But for the sake of sanity, I think it would be best to just introduce a per colony penalty to base growth.

Admin cap could be the other colony growth nerf stick. Per colony admin cap should be more like 10 though, and going over admin cap should have more teeth.

 

[AlanC9]

My impression is that SP players generally like a bit of randomness in their starting difficulty, so I'm not sure starting leader traits ought to be addressed. OTOH, MP players, understandably, tend to feel differently.

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

Ok, on the one hand you say that research and pops snowball too hard. On the other hand you say that systems are too expensive and not worth it, if one considers the empire sprawl. Now the higher empire sprawl costs of systems do hinder the snowballing a little bit, as they raise the research costs.

No, they don't. Just try not to build outposts, as they are a waste of admin cap. I only do that on systems with really valuable resources or habitable planets (or strategic choke points).

A colony on the other hand multiplies your economic growth by adding pop growth for the same measly 2 admin cap.

 

[Dinkelman]

I don't agree with any of these suggestions, but colony growth is a bit wonky, and favours rapid colonization a bit too much. The only thing that does anything to keep it in check is the -50% growth for new colonies. It is true that just because a quantity of people are spread on different planets, doesn't mean they grow faster. One way that wouldn't have worked with old pops is to have colony ships actually resettle a pop instead of spawning one from thin air. But now, pops are smaller and more numerous so it might work. This would tip the scale back a bit in favour of less rapid expansion. You could try to make pop growth proportionate to the population, but I think that would get messy fast. large planets would spit out pops too fast to handle, and early growth would be too slow.

I think wide is slightly too good currently. Obviously it makes sense for them to get the benefits they do, being large, but the drawbacks of an expansive empire just aren't there. Unity should be harder to achieve, not easier, so a unity cost penalty for number of colonies and or pops should be reinstated. This whilst lowering the unity cost increase from traditions so that the average is more or less kept, but wide gets worse, and tall gets better. And wide empires should be more challenging to keep together, with things like ethics divergence, and independence factions, and other inner power struggles.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Population and economy go hand and hand. What exceptions exist in our modern world (UAE, Saudi) are due to their export nature to large populations. Even steel needs a meatbag to keep it going.

From gameplay perspective, you see this represented pretty well. Large populations produce large quantities of stuff. The balance seems to lie in Science and Unity; the more massive you are, the greater the cost to produce is. Energy, being credits, being money is a broad representation of the smoothing of transactions between the population. Not economy itself.

No... most production is made by machines today... just because you measure GNP does not mean it is directly related to population, the same with resource extraction. Most production is made by machines and will require even less meat bags in the future, eventually the number of meat bag it require to produce things will be so low that it will become inconsequential and even today energy prices is a large constriction for production not people in most high technology societies.

In my industry where I work people in the production have been reduced to about to about 30-40% in the last fifteen years alone while production have increased by 25-50% as one example. By Stellaris technology level you could most probably extract all the natural resources and build all the industry to consume it with only a few POP per planet. Those POP would mainly be administration, engineers and maintenance workers. That is from a realistic perspective and enough energy to do so. There is a reason why such a large amount of people work in the service industry in modern societies today and even this sector will diminish when it is taken over by automation as well.

This has nothing to do about the game though... it just reveal how 18-20th century the economy in Stellaris is.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I don't agree with any of these suggestions, but colony growth is a bit wonky, and favours rapid colonization a bit too much. The only thing that does anything to keep it in check is the -50% growth for new colonies. It is true that just because a quantity of people are spread on different planets, doesn't mean they grow faster. One way that wouldn't have worked with old pops is to have colony ships actually resettle a pop instead of spawning one from thin air. But now, pops are smaller and more numerous so it might work. This would tip the scale back a bit in favour of less rapid expansion. You could try to make pop growth proportionate to the population, but I think that would get messy fast. large planets would spit out pops too fast to handle, and early growth would be too slow.

I think wide is slightly too good currently. Obviously it makes sense for them to get the benefits they do, being large, but the drawbacks of an expansive empire just aren't there. Unity should be harder to achieve, not easier, so a unity cost penalty for number of colonies and or pops should be reinstated. This whilst lowering the unity cost increase from traditions so that the average is more or less kept, but wide gets worse, and tall gets better. And wide empires should be more challenging to keep together, with things like ethics divergence, and independence factions, and other inner power struggles.

Not only Unity should be harder... technology require an educated population to even use as should specialist jobs... certain more than others. Populations should need some form of education system to move from one job to another. This would make it way harder to just sprawl out and create colonies. Investing in education would actually take effort and someone who invest in education more than expansion will be better at converting basic resources into more advanced resources and be much better at producing more per POP.

This would make the economy allot more realistic and make expansion more dynamic and less about just growing POP... you could also concentrate on getting more out of the POP that you have in a better way.

There should be more resources in the game such as machine tools and a bunch of civilian items you need to build things.

Resources should also be local and needed to be moved from place to place where it is needed (of course automated)... but this would all show the real cost of colonization in a very different way. One large problem are global resources and not enough second or even third level of manufactured goods.

I also think that most production from basic to refined resources should also increase the resource cost as well as increase the production rate. Pure efficiency should be a much rarer type of bonus to reduce the snowball effect.

 

[Dinkelman]

At some point, you need to stop focusing on predictions of the real world in the future, and look at what is best from a game design perspective though. Introducing even more elements would make the game too complex too be learnable to new players, and enjoyable in general.

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

I don't agree with any of these suggestions.

Then do make a suggestion that actually improves things. Because as things are now, if you go tall, you can easily fall 50 years behind by endgame.

 

[Dinkelman]

Then do make a suggestion that actually improves things. Because as things are now, if you go tall, you can easily fall 50 years behind by endgame.

Did you read the rest or just the first sentence?

 

[ChiefBigFeather]

Did you read the rest or just the first sentence?

I did. There is a suggestion that obviously doesn't work (as you point out yourself). So how to fix the pop growth issue? Just with unity?

There is a unity cost penalty mechanic in place already: It is called admin cap. But the penalty is too low to work and the costs in admin cap are way off. Why not fix those?

 

[Sopbucket]

I'm pretty sure the whole point of the Empire Sprawl penalty is to keep big empires on par with small empires in certain areas. It shouldn't be thought of as a penalty, more like a necessary balancing mechanism that is there because the game treats research and unity the same as other resources, but doesn't want to see them grow linearly with the size of your empire.

The only reason admin capacity is a thing is because it fills a hole that was left when the core sector limit became obsolete. It works, but it's really not necessary in my opinion.

 

[AlanC9]

The problem is that your argument seems to be OCD-based. For those of us who don't suffer from that, the case hasn't been made.