We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly. You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
It had this sort of, retro-feeling. The mini-game of tile arrangements being important was something that fascinated me, and yes, while it was a simple puzzle, it had so much potential that I occasionally think of just popping the concept out into my own game where you just collect territory that are tile puzzles and arrange them to the needs of your...thing. It would have to be a fantasy game, to properly be different enough.
I'm sitting here thinking of a suggestion that there be a shipyard building, and then drifting over to the idea of it taking 2 building slots...and then to the idea of it taking 4 tiles in a 2x2. It gets adjacency bonuses from alloys and generators, and gives bonuses to trade places.
I'm dreaming of planetary rings that are 1 tile wide and 8 long. Of habitats that are 2 over 4 over 2 tiles, giving adjacencies in the z as well as the x and y.
I'm imagining a ringworld that's 4 tiles by 25 tiles, and otherwise just having ideas.
The way that tile arranging game worked spoke to me. I don't know why, but I'm always trying to fit all the systems we have today into a tile system.
How might we have fit districts into the tile system? well...we could always do as we do know, and draw them on the planet above the tiles. Or a district could be a zone on the tiles, and by being a district, it gives some bonuses or requires some configuration, and squeezes the jobs in.
Well, we went a different way. But the tiles are something I miss.
Since Stellaris is a 3D game, a planet's tiles could even be wrapped onto a sphere.
Polar region tiles? Low habitability unless you find (or create) an Arctic preference species. Put a machine factory there, or some resource silos, if you don't want those species on the world.
Ocean tiles? Put an Aquatic species on it for a bonus.
Calamitous Birth colony ships could select where you make a new crater.
I'm dreaming of planetary rings that are 1 tile wide and 8 long. Of habitats that are 2 over 4 over 2 tiles, giving adjacencies in the z as well as the x and y.
I'm imagining a ringworld that's 4 tiles by 25 tiles, and otherwise just having ideas.
It had this sort of, retro-feeling. The mini-game of tile arrangements being important was something that fascinated me, and yes, while it was a simple puzzle, it had so much potential that I occasionally think of just popping the concept out into my own game where you just collect territory that are tile puzzles and arrange them to the needs of your...thing. It would have to be a fantasy game, to properly be different enough.
As much as the current system has given populations and jobs some real flexibility, I also miss aspects of the tile puzzle. Personally I'd suggest the system's core failing was to tie pops to tiles civ-style, with a 1:1 pop:tile relationship, which meant you could only support as many pops as you had tiles.
The tile system had a massive amount of potential. It could easily have been upgraded to add complexity, new resources, supply chains, more buildings, more choices, more fun.
The planet screens we have, the population tab, the decisions, the planetary features and more are all growing more dry, cold and technical. The old tiles were warm, rich, textured and flavourful. Having both would be my preferred solution.
Reintroduce the tile visuals and the fun little mini-game of adjacency bonuses for the main planetary screen to give it back some warmth and flavour.
Keep the other tabs around to see the demographic charts, pop ethics, % boosts, coloured grids of squares and collapsable lists of jobs to show total inputs and outputs for the cold, hard, dry accounting.
There's a game called "Slipways" that I tried back in June 2021 (sorry if my knowledge is very out of date now). It had an amazingly functional free pixel-art demo that tempted me to buy it but sadly the full game didn't grip me for some reason - it's a short and simple 3X game when I think I wanted it to be one part of a larger 4X game. But it showcases what could have been and achieved with the tile system, lots of adjacency and the fun of trying to make self-sufficient, mutually-boosting patterns that make the most of the resources you've been given.
Old Stellaris had buildings on a grid of tiles on a planet. Slipways has planets as the buildings, and you link them together (adjacency bonuses!) freely within ranges, with the quirk being that the lines can't cross (so you can't just link everything to everything).
But most of the mechanics could work almost exactly the same (and it uses a lot of similar resources to Stellaris to make comparisons much easier).
Give you an example from that game:
A Jungle (planet) has 4 different build options (Colony, Farm, Mechanized Harvest, Tourist Resort)
As a Jungle Farm it produces 1 food base, up to 3 food if you supply it with what it needs (Robots, Tech, Biomass)
As a Colony it produces 1 Pop, up to 4 pops if you supply it with what the colony needs (Tech, Food and Goods. Think Food + Amenities + CG)
As a Mechanized Harvest it produces 1 biomass, 1 water, up to 2 of each if you supply it with lots of robots.
As a Tourist Resort it provides -1 credit, up to +3 if you have People, as well as the goods and robots they need
In Stellaris terms you could almost map the mechanics 1:1
A Jungle tile feature unlocks 4 extra Jungle-specific buildings that can be built on it. These buildings have lower base output, but higher max output thanks to adjacency bonuses from nearby buildings and features.
A Jungle Farm produces food and boosts adjacent Colonies, and gets a bonus from adjacent cheap labour (Robotic Factories/Slave Processing), Biomass from Mechanized Harvests, Tech parts from Recycling Operations. If you don't have any of those to boost it just build hydroponics instead.
A Colony supports the growth of (1-4) Pops, maximum output when adjacent to sources of Food, CG and Amenities (Farm + Temple + Artisan). If you don't have those build luxury housing instead to support (2) pops.
A Mechanized Harvest can produce some biomass and water and boost adjacent Jungle Farms, used on low habitability planets as it only needs robots
A Tourist Resort produces credits, max output when next to a Colony, a source of entertainment, and a source of cheap labour (servitude robots/slaves), and undeveloped/special features like wandering forests.
Put those together and you have a fun little puzzle. You can specialize the world for food production and build farms and relocate robots there to work the tiles.
You want a bit more food so you start to produce robots locally rather than shipping excess robots in from other worlds and now you get extra food to export.
To make even more robots and more food you build a mine to boost the robot factory.
Now you're producing more food than before but also thanks to the robots and factories you may want to build a colony since it'll be boosted by all the other buildings (if you have pops that can live here), then you can plop down a Tourist Resort where people enjoy the undeveloped forests and get pampered by robots and fed exotic food.
It's fun because the minigame is different on each planet based on the layout of features and the position of tiles and blockers, but simple enough that it's not too much work.
As the little jungle world grows it shifts from exporting a small amount of food and importing robotic workers to being almost self-sufficient, having a massive food export, a small but very productive and rapidly growing colony and valuable little tourist resort.
Complex, and fun, but it only needs a small number of tiles. You don't need 150 pops, 30 districts and a dozen buildings. All that fun could be done with just 6-10 tiles... if the tile+adjacency system had been given more developmental time to really shine.
To me, the old system was simple and fun. A warm slice of toast. Not filling enough for a main meal but a light snack that could easily have accepted some toppings (cheese or beans - additional resources, mechanics and building options or upgrade paths).
Watching the changes has been like seeing toast fall in excruciatingly slow-motion butter-side down, then having to clean-up the greasy mess on the floor (now attracting bugs) and being told there's no more butter and that I will have to learn to love dry-toast, with no butter.
Now the years have passed and my plate is filled with lots of toast, cut into lots of identical tiny cubes arranged neatly in a grid. I asked for toast, I bought toast, I watched it fall on the floor and now I've got a distressingly large pile of croutons instead. I'm more than a little sad about it, but food is food.
The tile system was nice for showing what your planet is like and getting those occasional bonuses but it's not a good idea to reimplement.
The main three problems are that adding tiles like the way planets can expand now would mean reshuffling the tiles, adjacency either has to be solved so the AI can always use it or it'll be impossible for the AI to use, and lastly it's absolute micro for players.
I'd love to see my districts and buildings represented on the planet. Maybe a looser system multiple buildings and districts are in a 'region' tile and get bonuses from other buildings placed in that region.
I don't know if tiny planet based efficiencies will ever be worth it in this game. The planet wide efficiencies are already simpler and easier to wrap your head around.
The main three problems are that adding tiles like the way planets can expand now would mean reshuffling the tiles, adjacency either has to be solved so the AI can always use it or it'll be impossible for the AI to use, and lastly it's absolute micro for players.
It's a fair point about AI - the Galactic Civilizations series has been using tiles in planet management for at least 2 + 3 and the AI still has no clue how to use it.
As for the micro, that's also a reasonable point, though it's hardly a larger problem than the existing micro of managing dozens of worlds.
I think it is more micro inherently because instead of just placing down templates you have to look at the tile shapes of the world. Otherwise the tile system would be 'solved' and wouldn't matter because you'd just paint every planet the same way.
I do want to have a representation of the real geography of the planet beyond the features tab. I liked that aspect of the old tile system. But I don't think it can be that way. Maybe there's room for a softer tile system though. I'm thinking like regions or something where there's certain bonuses for building in certain places and they have a cap but not so granular as to be tiles related to each building or district.
Until something like that is considered though they really should bring back the backgrounds from the old tile system and at least place those behind the images of buildings. It just looked like a real place and not an icon that way!
I was always one of the players who felt like I was playing a mini-game rather than trapped doing micro. Upgrading a bunch of buildings, yeah, that was micro. Today's system is arguably less micro, but not because they got rid of the tile system...but because there's better tools for upgrading, and less buildings to upgrade.
I am describing a very different game here, but its a sort of game that many players do enjoy: we could have had a system where we could save a template of buildings in shape, select it, and drag it across the grid, plopping it down to pre-build. It doesn't build buildings where it can't for whatever reason, but builds the rest. At the most basic level, you could just have a full 5x5 template that you drop over whatever shape planet, with a capital in the middle and the most important buildings radiating out. That's your one and done, and yeah, its not as good as carefully watching the puzzle...But then save a modified version, then save a few small mock ups, and you have tools that you can drag over the board...but add enough strangeness to the board, and you can have a new puzzle each time.
That's a good way of putting it. This felt true for initial colony placement in particular ("do I put it on the mineral-and-food tile, so I don't waste production, or over where it can give adjacencies to other tiles?").
That's a good way of putting it. This felt true for initial colony placement in particular ("do I put it on the mineral-and-food tile, so I don't waste production, or over where it can give adjacencies to other tiles?").
When you got a planet with migrating forests or super-fauna, and you've got two spots that will give great adjacency, that was just tasty! One scientist with a huge bonus. To be really down on the current system, these days, planet specialization consists of scanning for any bonus, and then sticking a label on it and clicking a build button five times, while back in the day...yeah, the planet screen was something other than just an info-dump. It was a game!
What i miss the most of the tilesystem are the old sectors and how they worked with the planets, even the "ai" was able to fullfill its jobs in managing the sectors, excess micro was non existent before 2.2. New planets and stuff was fast integrated into existing empires, we could purge single pops of a species we didnt want (the slave market would had worked nicely these days). Growth stopped when planets were filled
Tiles had micro in the beginning and it became less and less important how to build up planets later on, the two resources and science made the choices pretty easy how to build up the economy.
I sometimes think while playing this game where the game would be if the devs had not reworked that system and instead would have worked to improve the AI, added more buildings for flair with all the dlcs (every aspect of the economy we play now would also been possible on tiles)... Now we have to hassle with closing jobs manually which we have to open later, a slow migration mechanic which does exclude robots and slaves, uncontrollable robot contruction, a single pop growth system... i dont know if its gotten really more enjoyable with all these changes
I honestly never understand the nostalgia for the early Stellaris features like multiple FTL methods, tile system, borders expanding on their own. From my perspective, everything we have now is far more consistent and better. To each their own, I guess.
I honestly never understand the nostalgia for the early Stellaris features like multiple FTL methods, tile system, borders expanding on their own. From my perspective, everything we have now is far more consistent and better. To each their own, I guess.
I enjoyed all the systems but, for the most part, they weren't really well implemented. You could do some cool things with the tile system that made some empires feel unique (agrarian idyll + inward perfection allowed you to build some really crazy farms, for example), and it was satisfying to "finish" a planet, but overall I think it was kind of tedious. I find the game better now, even if many of the current systems still need quite a bit of attention. My occasional annoyance with the current systems is what triggers any nostalgia, but I still wouldn't want to go back to the old game.
I do prefer the new system since planets keep growing much longer than with the tile system.
But I'm also a bit nostalgic about the tile system. I loved building a slave processing next to my capital building to produce both food and minerals.
It had this sort of, retro-feeling. The mini-game of tile arrangements being important was something that fascinated me, and yes, while it was a simple puzzle, it had so much potential that I occasionally think of just popping the concept out into my own game where you just collect territory that are tile puzzles and arrange them to the needs of your...thing. It would have to be a fantasy game, to properly be different enough.
I'm sitting here thinking of a suggestion that there be a shipyard building, and then drifting over to the idea of it taking 2 building slots...and then to the idea of it taking 4 tiles in a 2x2. It gets adjacency bonuses from alloys and generators, and gives bonuses to trade places.
I'm dreaming of planetary rings that are 1 tile wide and 8 long. Of habitats that are 2 over 4 over 2 tiles, giving adjacencies in the z as well as the x and y.
I'm imagining a ringworld that's 4 tiles by 25 tiles, and otherwise just having ideas.
The way that tile arranging game worked spoke to me. I don't know why, but I'm always trying to fit all the systems we have today into a tile system.
How might we have fit districts into the tile system? well...we could always do as we do know, and draw them on the planet above the tiles. Or a district could be a zone on the tiles, and by being a district, it gives some bonuses or requires some configuration, and squeezes the jobs in.
Well, we went a different way. But the tiles are something I miss.
I honestly never understand the nostalgia for the early Stellaris features like multiple FTL methods, tile system, borders expanding on their own. From my perspective, everything we have now is far more consistent and better. To each their own, I guess.
Personally I am nostalgic about warp drives because I think they're the better FTL method and I think Stellaris would've been a much better game if they had chosen warp drives.
That's easy to say now though, hindsight is 2020, hyperdrive didn't work out.
-
Edit: That being said, I am not nostalgic about tilesets, it was a cute mini game for sure but that detracted from "grand strategy" feel for me. Now planets feel more alive
The Tile system was so much micro hell I was entirely done with even the idea of playing any more Stellaris when they swapped to the current pops management system. The current one is vastly superior in so many ways in that regard.
