Please do something with governors

[Peace Weaver]

While there is definitely room for continuing to improve and refine how leaders work, I think one thing that people are overlooking is that the combination of fewer leaders and more powerful leaders creates a new role for leader positions. The planetary governor isn't just about improving the planet that they are governing, it's also about training a future a leader who can serve on council and give you empire wide bonuses.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Unlikely to happen on anything other than a gestalt.
That is, unless you want to be sitting at 0 sprawl and producing nothing but unity for leader upkeep.

It's not that expensive, 3000 unity at most if you do it the hard way, 2000 at most if you wait until you nab Gray Eminence, or 0 unity if you take Feudal System (in which the governors will pay for your scientist/admiral's upkeep).

If everyone is low level, it's maybe 750 unity.

If you get 4 Gray Eminence, it's only 6 extra governors to hit zero.

The painful part is the leadership XP, since it caps all leaders hired after you start really stacking, at level 4.

 

[Strangedane]

It's not that expensive, 3000 unity at most if you do it the hard way, 2000 at most if you wait until you nab Gray Eminence, or 0 unity if you take Feudal System (in which the governors will pay for your scientist)
admiral's upkeep.

If everyone is low level, it's maybe 750 unity.

If you get 4 Gray Eminence, it's only 6 extra governors to hit zero.

The painful part is the leadership XP, since it caps all leaders hired after you start really stacking, at level 4.

Oh right.
Feudal system might have a cheese option.

I'll still maintain that for anything else you need to divert way too many resources for it to be worth it.
Not talking about respeccing your empire lategame because winmore is just winmore and never relevant in these discussions.
I'm talking about it being a competitive investment compared to normal snowballing strats.
There's also hiring costs to consider.

 

[Lucododosor]

Just a reminder to stay kind and on topic. Let's quit this conversation about who disagrees with whom and go back to the subject of the thread.
Posts deleted/edited and infractions given.

 

[Nakkivene]

I didn't even think clearspeed/buildspeed were planet specific. I suspect I just won't pick those traits.

 

[oreopirate]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record here. But since none of the people who actually defend this decisions could answer it so far. WHAT EVEN IS THE BENEFIT OF LIMITING SECTOR GOVERNOR traits to a single planet,

This has been said, but not really outright. With the new traits, a governor that applied his traits to every planet in a sector would make the resource and science worse. And I don't mean you have less. The default settings (i.e the way the devs recommend you playing) are Ensign, with a mid game of 2300, and a late of 2400. Who here honestly isn't licking their first repeatable tech by 2300? Or fully into repeatables by 2325? Even if you have a small fleet, the Khan is no longer a threat because your 17k stack vastly out techs his main fleet. By the time you hit the L-Gates, the grey tempest is simply about slowly draining their numbers, or shoving 4-6 fleets in there to deal with them.
These used to be mid game crises that ended playthroughs, and re-arranged the galaxy politically. Not anymore, because it is so easy to get so much research and resources. Even the AI can make these threats null and void because of the improvement they got.
Sector governor only affecting the sector capital with his traits, means that it matters where your sector capital is. It might be worth moving the capital, or losing out on a scientist to drop a governor on an extremely stacked world. And since he doesn't affect everything else, This means that tech and tradition slows down like it needs to. The way the game is intended, is to hit repeatable in the late 2300's or early 2400's. Not in 2320, with a maxed out tradition tree, and researching ambitions.

So that is the benefit. It slows down the game and is in effect partially an anti-snowball measure.

Lots of good comments in this thread so I don't have a lot to add but I think this sums it up. Planetary governors seem to be an idea completely at odds with the new limited leader system.

Also this is potentially just a me thing, but is anyone else bothered by all the blank silhouettes on planetary screens and fleets? Maybe it's because I'm not used to it but it's a bit ugly and seems to imply you're doing something wrong if you don't have someone on that planet.

Personally, I don't think they are. Just because then you do have to choose between exploring and developing. And when your first batch dies in the mid 2200's help to dlineate the shift between expansion, and development, then the shift in the 2300's between development and conquest (extermination).
But yes, the silhouette bugs me. I innately want to fill it, which sucks because that penalty for going over leader cap is... Damn. Even parlimentarians have trouble taking that hit.

I also think that the basic number of leader need to be more like 8 that 6 (i like to begin with 1-2 governors, 1 general, 4 Scientists and have room for leader who come from events...)

I'm torn on this. I feel like having more slots would be nice, but I know that I'd fill them up with scientists for exploration in nearly all cases.

I didn't even think clearspeed/buildspeed were planet specific. I suspect I just won't pick those traits.

Well, they were, but before now a governor's trait applied to all planets in a sector, not just the one they personally governed. But in general, they lost most to all value anyways by 2245.

 

[Calvax]

It's not that expensive, 3000 unity at most if you do it the hard way, 2000 at most if you wait until you nab Gray Eminence, or 0 unity if you take Feudal System (in which the governors will pay for your scientist/admiral's upkeep).

If everyone is low level, it's maybe 750 unity.

If you get 4 Gray Eminence, it's only 6 extra governors to hit zero.

The painful part is the leadership XP, since it caps all leaders hired after you start really stacking, at level 4.

It would also allow you to then ascend planets for dirt cheap, since the cost of ascension is 10x empire size. So you can get a 90% reduction on ascension and spam it across all worlds to boost production further. That may compensate for the loss of higher leader bonuses.

 

[currylambchop]

I do have to wonder, why not just not pick the trait then. If you feel you must minmax this way with that trait, just don't pick it.

 

[Casko]

Also this is potentially just a me thing, but is anyone else bothered by all the blank silhouettes on planetary screens and fleets? Maybe it's because I'm not used to it but it's a bit ugly and seems to imply you're doing something wrong if you don't have someone on that planet.

I am extremely bothered by this myself.

 

[RoverStorm]

Ed: if I had unlimited time and money, I'd pay someone to do a study across stellaris and other strategy games to figure out what percentage of time players spent gathering information and using it to make high impact strategic decisions and what percentage is doing low impact configuration changes to get a 50 credit voucher that can be applied to removing a basic terrain blocker.

Completely depends on the individual. Many players I have played with will ignore several mechanics just because they don't care in the slightest about efficiency. I've played with players who refuse to engage with pop editing, who don't bother with admirals after the first three, who just use their starting one science ship and replace the scientist as they need. Granted, these are also the types of people for whom sensible game choices don't exist. They voluntarily take Imperial Cult last game when the cost of a single edict is over 2k just because they got the Divine Monarch event for their Chosen One and want to RP.

Then you have me. Do you know why I take Overtuned often? Because I can start the game creating a subspecies for every job, then use the first few colonies and the casual kneecapping of early society research and liberal use of resettlement to make sure every job has a subspecies specifically crafted for that job. Then I use a combination of forced growth and even more resettlement to populate new constructions with exactly the correct number of each subspecies for each planned job.
All this for like on average a +10%/+15% additive modifier.

Which should be removed. Those bonuses are laughably out of whack. +2% leadership XP, +2 naval capacity, and <research/unity through the entire empire gets around 2% faster, with that 2% increasing and approaching infinity as the number of governors approaches 50>.

Even if it didn't stack additively, that 2% sprawl reduction is way stronger than the others.

I like to imagine that the sprawl reduction is the "point" of this one and the other two are pennies to compensate if you really wanted the tree finisher but aren't using governors.

But yeah that form of sprawl reduction has some....issues....

Unlikely to happen on anything other than a gestalt.
That is, unless you want to be sitting at 0 sprawl and producing nothing but unity for leader upkeep.

There is a way to reduce the upkeep for the governors to nothing.

The painful part is the leadership XP, since it caps all leaders hired after you start really stacking, at level 4.

Technically 5. There is an agenda that straight up gives a level to all leaders under level 5 if you have taken Aptitude. It also gives 2000 XP which I will have to do some testing to see if XP modifiers affect event-gained XP.

Feudal system might have a cheese option.

Yes, yes they do. Even not including the sprawl reduction modifier, Feudal System is very good about turning this leader cap into a suggestion. And I kind of love it, honestly. This means the civic reduces the penalty for over-extending with your own planets and for over-extending with vassal quantity.

 

[Calvax]

I do have to wonder, why not just not pick the trait then. If you feel you must minmax this way with that trait, just don't pick it.

That's certainly an option though it presents a problem itself. If traits are so bad that it's best not to pick them then there should be a balance pass. As some people have suggested moving these traits into ruler traits make more sense than planetary ones.

I am extremely bothered by this myself.

I summed up my thoughts better in another thread; the silhouettes feel like you're lacking something that needs to be fulfilled. This is (now) old logic and instead the UI should present leaders as additions that provide bonuses.

 

[Millbot]

Planetary governors are fine. With the fact that we can find leaders and the fact that not all builds may want to have a council filled with governors. You're going to easily end up with governors that aren't on the council.

Where issues crop us, is when you get traits where it's a single click to get a price discount and quicker build speed. At that point, people that can't help themselves or are trying to eek out the most advantages they can in competitive play are going to make themselves miserable, by shuffling the governors around.

If the devs want to keep such traits around. They should be limited to the council, since that is going to kill much of the shuffling.

That said, might be possible to tweak the code so that they could say keep the build time reduction but instead of the saved time being deducted up front, it's kind of done on the fly. Probably the way to do that without messing up performance would be that if my governor has a build time reduction bonus, when I build on a world they directly govern, that build timer gets flagged, so that if I remove my governor, the game will recalculate the remaining time. Thus killing the incentive to move my governor around to speed up building stuff because there will be no gains for doing it. This isn't an option with cost reduction, which again probably should be restricted to a council trait.

I still maintain both should be council traits because empire wide, they are easier to justify investing in because you'll get good usage out of them.

Sure I don't do this stuff because I find it to be a chore, but the devs should fix it, even if it's an option that people can ignore. It can make MP an unpleasant experience for someone, if they are expecting a reasonable casual game and then get curb stomped with everyone else because of the one guy that goes hot and sweaty on doing all the tedious thing that end up snowballing into a huge advantage. More importantly, it's going to color people's feedback and could result in the devs being convinced to nerf something that would be fine, had the tedious optional stuff been stamped out.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I do have to wonder, why not just not pick the trait then. If you feel you must minmax this way with that trait, just don't pick it.

If the correct thing to do is to just not pick the trait, then it's a trap.

The basic traits that give +4 energy/+4 minerals a month are terrible, right? Over 30 years, that trait would give 4*12*30=1440 minerals. If you pick up Architectural Interest and reduce building costs to 10%, then build 25 industrial districts, you're saving 25*500*.1=1250 minerals. The worst basic traits give more benefit than the Architectural Interest veteran trait unless you move the governor around.

To repeat: if the trait is useless unless you do something deeply unfun, then it should be fixed or removed. It's a trap either way (either baiting you into picking a trait that gives little/no benefit, or baiting you into committing to boring micro to make your trait pick justified).

Edit, with a better comparison: it takes 480 days to build an industrial district. If you have +100% build speed, call it 240. With a 10% discount, you save 40 minerals every 8 months; 5 minerals a month, if the governor is constantly overseeing continuous building from the day they're born to the day they die. If you don't move them from world to world to queue things up, the basic traits will be more impactful, even if your build up a planet from 0 to ecumenopolis without moving them.

 

[Heliotic]

There's an issue when 50 governer allowed, 0 empire spawl

Oh, here's a spicy decision. Governors reduce "empire sprawl' by putting that planet under full AI control.

How many people are so desperate for the 50 credit bonus for blocker removal that they'd let the AI run hog wild on their delicate planets.

PS: PDX, this is me being a sarcastic jerk plz do not read or consider.

 

[BrokenSky]

I have to say, I actually really like the fact that there are governor traits which only apply bonuses to the planet the governor is on, and I feel like this is something which should be retained, rather than just turning them all into sector-wide bonuses. Honestly I would probably split these into a separate group of traits - so you could have a governor who's heavily spec'd into sector bonuses or one who's focused on buffing just the planet he's on.

Naturally, those traits which only provide immediate bonuses like building or blocker removal cost should be sector-level, while planet level traits could be much stronger and more specialized. Of course that raises the question of whether sector governor traits should affect a planet with a planetary governor, and I don't know for sure how I'd handle it, but in principle I think that having these as separate bonus groups makes sense?

 

[RoverStorm]

Honestly I would probably split these into a separate group of traits - so you could have a governor who's heavily spec'd into sector bonuses or one who's focused on buffing just the planet he's on.

Seems like a good idea to use the, uh, whatever the "subclass" system. We have a class for buffing planet bonuses and a class for buffing council bonuses, and the third option is for developing new planets and that seems like a good one to switch for sector bonuses...which I'm just now realizing that I think that implies that the developers actually DO intend for you to move governors around to develop new planets!

 

[currylambchop]

To repeat: if the trait is useless unless you do something deeply unfun, then it should be fixed or removed. It's a trap either way (either baiting you into picking a trait that gives little/no benefit, or baiting you into committing to boring micro to make your trait pick justified).

Yea it should be buffed, but the problem isn't that a minmaxer is moving his governors. It's that the trait is weak.

The post came off as a minmaxer wanting the developers to programme the game around his specific and unfun playstyle

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Yea it should be buffed, but the problem isn't that a minmaxer is moving his governors. It's that the trait is weak.

The post came off as a minmaxer wanting the developers to programme the game around his specific and unfun playstyle

Buffing the trait makes the "the optimal play is unfun play" problem worse, and increases the temptation for everyone who was just ignoring it before.

"Make it brokenly strong for minmaxers so that it's mildly useful to everyone else" is not a good solution, either. The design of the trait, in the current system, is inherently bad.

It must be fixed, not buffed.

Edit: this may have been phrased overly harshly. To clarify: the problem is the way that the bulk of the benefit is the cost reduction. If the build speed got an enormous buff (+100%, not +10%, for instance) that would make it stronger for its seemingly intended purpose, and legitimately useful. That would technically just be buffing it, but would fix it in my mind. You'd still move the governor around, but it would actually feel good (move the development specialist in, build up everything, move them away after a decade, with the planet transformed).

 

[Losttruppen]

That's because the changes are for the better. That there are people genuinely throwing tantrums over not having a dedicated Scientist for each type of Research, or because they can't recruit masses of Scientists to spam early exploration, is disappointing but sadly not unexpected. Those people seemingly think the game shouldn't evolve and change, and themselves along with it. They're stamping their feet, rather than adapting themselves.

My problem with this update has been most of the things they didn't change, saying people are "throwing tantrums" over issues that persist without being addressed and in most cases becoming more obviously flawed is pretty dismissive.

Switching building costs governors around in 3.7 wasn't fun and isn't fun in 3.8
Switching research department leaders around wasn't fun in 3.7.
Pausing the game, enabling the blocker edict and moving the governor around to queue up blocker removal across the entire empire and then disabling the edict again was ridiculous in 3.7 and it's still ridiculous in 3.8.

I got in a discussion in one of the recent DDs about the 3 Researcher positions and I imagine a lot of the people disagreeing with me thought I actually wanted to return to that swap around mini-game. My issue with these things is that 3.8 kept these in without addressing why they were done, so we are left with the same problems with either the same or worse solutions.

Scientist Expertise Traits still exist and can still be used to manipulate Tech draws, but Expertise Traits are Council Traits and so a lot more rare, and we have about a tenth of the Leaders to draw from, so if you want to direct your Research you still can in the same way but it's more tedious to do(yet an entire Ascension is locked behind a Tech draw who's only influence comes from this Trait manipulation). Architectural Interest and Evironmentalist Traits still exist unchanged, yet can only be used on one Planet instead of many(if you don't move them). For a big Leader update 3.8 maintained a lot of the worst parts about Leaders.

What we have in paragons is a deliberate decision to cater more to the roleplayers than the minmaxers.

If someone can justify allocating one of their extremely limited Leader slots on a Governor who's Trait produces fewer Minerals than a single pop(or worse sits an Architectural Interest on a planet that isn't building) and will actively defend these terrible traits from being looked at, they would have been happy with any choice so it seems catering to them was unnecessary, where ignoring mechanically flawed traits and Leader adjacent mechanics in a big Leader overhaul seems an oversight.

I consider myself a role-player, but I have issues with this update there as well. Having only 6 important characters in an Empire of 50 planets and 200 systems bothers me. Having my Dark Eldar slavemaster's title be Minister of Defense bothers me. Having my Head of Research "specialize" in all three branches of Research bothers me.

The strange part is if they had added all the nice RP additions like the Council, the Planet Governors, the Trait picking/leveling, and left the mechanics the same, where you are only limited by how much Unity you allocate to your Leaders and how much micro you decide to do I would love this update. Instead I'm told by the devs that I had too many toys to play with, and that using them in certain ways was "manipulation" so they were taking most of them away and making "manipulation" tedious(while not addressing why we do it), yet they also say this still exists with the right Empire builds and DLC so this is still a viable strategy if you want to suffer through the obstacles they have placed in front of it, and here on the forums I'm told these were mostly unnecessary micro anyway and that I'm better off with most of my Fleets, Planets, Sectors, and Research Worlds unimproved by Leaders because they like this RP of 5 special characters, when they could very well have only employed 5 Leaders and implement their own self-imposed Leader cap rather than defend forcing one on everyone else.

 

[currylambchop]

Buffing the trait makes the "the optimal play is unfun play" problem worse, and increases the temptation for everyone who was just ignoring it before.

I wouldn't mind making it a councillor trait. I just think it's absurd to actually think about moving the governor around and treat that as the norm.