Only 6 Leaders?

[GeneralArmchair]

What I find most amusing is that in the same patch where we finally get the ability to tweak sectors, we also get a leader cap which make sectors almost completely unnecessary. You'll never have enough governors to govern all sectors, so why make more than 1 or 2. And since the governors traits only affect one planet anyway, then one planet sectors are not as much of a waste as they were before the patch. Good joke Paradox, you really got us with that one.

The monkey's paw curls.

Likewise, we get this big quality of life change for helping manage a large fleet of exploration ships, but now can't field enough scientists to crew that fleet.

 

[Calvax]

The monkey's paw curls.

Likewise, we get this big quality of life change for helping manage a large fleet of exploration ships, but now can't field enough scientists to crew that fleet.

I think you're onto something. We also got a big QoL update to the fleet manager, except admiral level varying the fleet cap causes reinforcement to not work if you copy a fleet over the base FCL.

That damn monkey paw...

 

[CBR JGWRR]

Mod that increase the limit to 50. Problem solved.

This. I've got it set at 500, no problems yet.

 

[Pancakelord]

Just blow wildly over it and you'll still end up with lots of tier 3-4 leaders. You are not getting the giga-chad Tier 8 ones without really focussing down on it, but at the same time ... a lot of pre 3.8 leaders werent amazing, and there are still many filler traits so it's not as critical to chase leaders as one might think (oh yes give me an admiral that generates 4 food a month [and it doesn't even scale with service years to emulate them building wealth up in the navy, putting it in to farmland] ... Christ lol).

This was taken in 2240ish, without me really paying attention and just farming primitives for insights whilst saturation-bombing a gestalt to pass the time.

Also happy to note you can rename the paragons.

 

[RoverStorm]

Just blow wildly over it and you'll still end up with lots of tier 3-4 leaders.

Actually even if you hit -99% which effectively locks your XP gain, you can still get up to level 5 leaders if you take "Aptitude", because it gives you an agenda that gives all leaders levels 1-4 an instant level up. This applies no matter the XP gain modifier. It can only be done every 40 years I think, so one will have to weigh if they plan to replace their leaders in the next 40 years.

 

[CMDR Exorcist]

I'm glad I'm not the only one hating the leader cap. It's nearly impossible to put leaders everywhere they need to be just to make basic things function in early game, forget stacking them at this point. It's broken the game for me.

 

[Tragopan]

I cannot believe something THIS awful made it past testing. Do they even bother playing a game past 100 years? At least introduce an infinitely repeatable tech or a scaling population modifier.

Having a hard limit (and with the exp gain penalty.. it IS a hard limit..) feels outright insane. The game is effectively broken at the moment.

 

[GeneralArmchair]

I cannot believe something THIS awful made it past testing. Do they even bother playing a game past 100 years? At least introduce an infinitely repeatable tech or a scaling population modifier.

Having a hard limit (and with the exp gain penalty.. it IS a hard limit..) feels outright insane. The game is effectively broken at the moment.

To me it feels like they did all of their playtesting on very tiny galaxies. The limits strike as something that makes sense in a small cramped galaxy, but they don't scale.

 

[Calvax]

To me it feels like they did all of their playtesting on very tiny galaxies. The limits strike as something that makes sense in a small cramped galaxy, but they don't scale.

To give them the benefit of the doubt I think this partly comes down to communication. The leader cap mechanics were glossed over in a couple of small paragraphs in dev diary 297. All it said was "we've introduced it for choice, IMO it's good" and that was it. Perhaps they didn't anticipate just how big a change this would be for most peoples play styles, or how unintuitive it would be to have so many fleets/planets with a big empty leader slot that you're not supposed to fill.

 

[Masked Ermine]

I am not liking the leader limit

At the start of the game I can only recruit 3 sceintists for research ships. I usually play on a huge galaxy with 5-6 ai civs. Its gonna slow the exploration stage massively for me. I usually have 10-12 ships out there by midgame. only 3 to explore means I have none spare to do anomalies and dig sites.

To help me plan, does anyone have any tips on this, and answwer the question have below...

1. Does not having an admiral for each fleet mean a massive drop in fleet strength in the end game?

2. Can you still hire admirals and generals from the mercenaries?

3. How many leaders can you expect to have mid/late game?

4. I usually have 15-20+ sectors... Does this mean that I will not be having a governor in each one?

Cheers!

It distinctly feels like there were meant to be two classes of leaders. One is the councilor class that confer empire wide buffs. It would make sense for your councilor level leader cap to be a hard, static 6 or so....

The other class would be the field agents class...these would be the field captains/commodores/commanders, the field researchers, etc. This leader cap would be larger (like initially 10 and then upgradeable).

In theory the field agent class could then be recruited to a councilor position....but councilors could only die or retire, never say lead a fleet in the field (or maybe make that a special perk for specific ethics/civ types).

Or, there was an idea to make everything tied into one leader (IE the empire would have 1 admiral, 1 general, 1 scientist, 1 infrastructural engineer, 1 etc) on a council. Then the science ships, military fleets and armies all reacted to that person without having to have their own groupings manned at that level.

But, for some reason the devs decided to split the difference between the 'two tier leader system' and the 'only one leader per department' system...and this split baby was born....

 

[GeneralArmchair]

To give them the benefit of the doubt I think this partly comes down to communication. The leader cap mechanics were glossed over in a couple of small paragraphs in dev diary 297. All it said was "we've introduced it for choice, IMO it's good" and that was it. Perhaps they didn't anticipate just how big a change this would be for most peoples play styles, or how unintuitive it would be to have so many fleets/planets with a big empty leader slot that you're not supposed to fill.

Whatever the reason, it's an oversight on their part. Bigger galaxies have more territory that needs to be explored, conquered, and governed. The council's influence only goes so far. We still need some local leaders to provide boots on the ground at points of interest, and there aren't enough leaders to go around when you play on a big galaxy.

 

[Masked Ermine]

Actually even if you hit -99% which effectively locks your XP gain, you can still get up to level 5 leaders if you take "Aptitude", because it gives you an agenda that gives all leaders levels 1-4 an instant level up. This applies no matter the XP gain modifier. It can only be done every 40 years I think, so one will have to weigh if they plan to replace their leaders in the next 40 years.

Ah yes, the man I want running my fleets...Admiral Rip Van Stinkle, he's 220 but he's rocking it like a hot young 180 year old....

 

[GeneralArmchair]

It distinctly feels like there were meant to be two classes of leaders. One is the councilor class that confer empire wide buffs. It would make sense for your councilor level leader cap to be a hard, static 6 or so....

The other class would be the field agents class...these would be the field captains/commodores/commanders, the field researchers, etc. This leader cap would be larger (like initially 10 and then upgradeable).

In theory the field agent class could then be recruited to a councilor position....but councilors could only die or retire, never say lead a fleet in the field (or maybe make that a special perk for specific ethics/civ types).

Or, there was an idea to make everything tied into one leader (IE the empire would have 1 admiral, 1 general, 1 scientist, 1 infrastructural engineer, 1 etc) on a council. Then the science ships, military fleets and armies all reacted to that person without having to have their own groupings manned at that level.

But, for some reason the devs decided to split the difference between the 'two tier leader system' and the 'only one leader per department' system...and this split baby was born....

Maybe I wasn't listening properly to the preview info, but to me it sounded like we'd have stronger yet more expensive leaders and that the unity costs of greater upkeep would keep us from being able to field quite as many as before. Of the new stronger but more expensive leaders, our best and brightest would serve on the council. Bigger galaxies would support bigger empires that produced more unity to sustain more leaders.

Then I saw the final product and saw that empires were all being shackled with a one-size-fits-all limit that directly influences how many leaders that we can field.

 

[Masked Ermine]

Maybe I wasn't listening properly to the preview info, but to me it sounded like we'd have stronger yet more expensive leaders and that the unity costs of greater upkeep would keep us from being able to field quite as many as before. Of the new stronger but more expensive leaders, our best and brightest would serve on the council. Bigger galaxies would support bigger empires that produced more unity to sustain more leaders.

Then I saw the final product and saw that empires were all being shackled with a one-size-fits-all limit that directly influences how many leaders that we can field.

Maybe that's what they said but what was produced feels like a creation born halfway between two extreme methodologies of only single department leads and a two tier system.

It just feels...like the exponential increase in costs outstrips the ability to expand and build to match the size...or that leader cap should be scaling to territory size...or population, not to arbitrary limit 001 react iff value greater than Z.

Everyone compares it to CK but I feel like there were more leader options in that with a select few being part of your 'council'.

 

[BaronMouths]

I wish they would add +1 limit at galaxy size 600, +2 at 800 and +3 at 1000.

Leader cap should also scale with pop (e.g. +1 every 100 pop) and administrative infrastructure (e.g. +1 per Planetary Capital for example).

Penalties for going over the limit should be toned down a little too. I think I was getting like -75% unity production for being 5 people over the cap. That's too harsh in my opinion. Going over the limit should be virtually painless, especially if you have a big empire.

 

[eu4 Bart]

I really like to roleplay so I was really excited about that expansion (last time happened with Federations). But... I think the idea of having few powerful leaders doesn't really works well with Stellaris and connects poorly to other systems. I would rather have them weaker but with more freedom. After one play I will wait for now, becose I really want to relax with Stellaris, not getting angry that I can't have admiral in my fleet.

 

[GeneralArmchair]

I still think that a lot of the pains of the new system could be solved by:

1. decoupling scientists from science ships so that early game exploration isn't so restrictive or micromanagement heavy. At the very least simple hyperlane exploration should be possible with unmanned ships.
2. un-nerf the sector governors. Let them govern the whole sector with their traits.
3. give us a means to build the infrastructure to support a larger pool of leaders. Look at our fleets. Do we just sit around and wait for the +naval capacity upgrade techs when we need bigger fleets? NO. We invest in anchorages and soldier jobs. Likewise we should be able to invest in some sort of academy job that can help boost our leader capacity, or star-base buildings that help add to the capacity.
4. Segregate the leader capacities since generals should NEVER be competing for a slot against scientists since that just isn't fair for anyone who isn't a scientist.

That wouldn't fix everything, but I think that it would quickly quell most of the complaints.

 

[-Marauder-]

I'm glad I'm not the only one hating the leader cap. It's nearly impossible to put leaders everywhere they need to be just to make basic things function in early game, forget stacking them at this point. It's broken the game for me.

The leader cap is honestly a massive step backwards.

 

[Ex Mudder]

I thought the leader XP reduction was additive... it's not, it's multiplicative.

Twice as many leaders reduces XP gain by half (50% multiplicative) I can see. Double leader cap = no XP gain is awful.

Expanding the council should boost the leader cap by +1.

 

[Gromit]

For an update that wants you to grow, cherish and view your leaders as more than just stats, it sure does encourage you to fire a whole lot of them without consequence.