I understand that there is a need to balance the game between large empires and small empires but you cannot make it better to play a small empire by making large empires less fun. Part of the fun is watching your empire grow but when that growth slows to a trickle arbitrarily it takes away all that satisfaction. If you need to balance it add interesting challenges that the larger empires must face that the small ones don't.
Ok so only done one game so far and got about 2/3rds way through wanted to see how high I could push my population and went all out with fertility perks, baal questline, food surpluses, basically if I could get a half a percent faster growth rate I took it. Immersion was totally broken for me when it took me 2ce as long to half fill my 30th colony as it did to fully fill my first which was done before I had all those perks. Game might be running faster now but it felt so much slower. I have never liked the kind of balancing that punishes players who do well by watching ever increasing progress bars. Its satisfying to always improve. Furthermore I really like roleplaying in Stellaris and one of my favorites to roleplay as is the devouring swarm. Was planning to make that my second playthrough but with as crippling as the pop growth is that no longer seems like it would be any fun.
That said if the games need to be balanced there are other more interesting ways to do so. The best ways add bonuses to the players being left behind or add unique and interesting challenges to those who get ahead. Stellaris is uniquely set up to do the later with your quest system. You could add some event chain across your whole empire as it reaches a certain size that could be as devastating as some civil war or some mini crisis directed directly at your empire. An obstacle to overcome is so much better than some handicap, especially a handicap that increases wait times as the game goes on. As it stands going for a large sprawling empire is incredibly boring and a huge part of the game was just sacrificed for the sake of balance.
Some personal suggestions to improve balancing without slowing down growth or production times:
-Tweaking Admin caps. Right now base cap is so low that even small empires need to build admin buildings. Some increasing that and adjusting relevant civics would help the smaller empires without punishing larger ones too much. Also adding some risk to civil war, increased piracy, and government ethics avoidance if you pass up your cap as well as other interesting issues besides increasing tech and unity costs would help hold larger nations back. Also if you were limited to one admin building per planed it would reduce planet specialization and encourage players to wait on better building upgrades before colonizing but once they do colonize they can still build up faster than they did last time.
-Add more to the sectors system besides automation. I like the micromanagement more then most so sectors are merely symbolic to me beyond getting some governor bonuses. One thought is to have a sector loyalty that larger empires have to deal with. The core sector where your capitol is will always be loyal and provide government ethics attraction. But other sectors could provide an attraction to an alternate ethic that throws you off. The sectors can be staggered a little as well, (1 capitol sector, 2-3 core sectors, 5-8 distant sectors) with each level being harder to keep in line. Furthermore the new envoys could be used internally to keep sectors in line or externally to cause a larger nation's sectors to rebel. Since the number of envoys are not dependent on empire size this would help out the smaller nations.
-Re-add leader caps. Let me clarify. I do not want the hard leader caps we had before. My suggestion would be to have a starting cap of 1 governor, 4 scientist, 1 Admiral, and 1 general. I would have techs to expand the number of each of them by at least 2 to a base of 2,6,3,3 and also add a building type that can only be place on a sector capitol (academy). There would be different academy types. Political adds 2 governor slots. Science adds 2 scientist slots. Military adds 2 admiral and 1 general. This is sort of a middle ground, but this way larger empires can get their higher leader counts they need while giving the Smaller nations some base to fall back on without the need to waste building slots. Admittedly this would only curb the excessively large empires.
- increased ease of spying on larger empires. Bigger empires would have more weakpoints. This would not be to cripple the larger empires own envoys but give smaller empires more room to take down larger ones. also if another nation (besides fallen empires which I haven't even tried to spy on yet) have far higher tech, certain lower level tech should be easy grabs, as in if a nation has level 5 lasers you should almost by default be able to just absorb level 3 lasers off of them. Just like when you scan ships I would have just keeping an envoy spying on them pick up lower tier tech progress. this would keep most nations on a more or less equivalent tech level.
- make factions more annoying to deal with. In my latest game only had 5 factions at 700 pop and non of them represented an ethic opposite of my government. (was playing militaristic, authoritarian, materialist dictatorship). furthermore I had very high sprawl (about 600 and admin of only 450)
- Special events that only target larger empires. 1.) Plague - maybe have some diseases pop up from time to time. targeting specifically high populations. (or computer virus for machine empire) These could affect an individual species can be passed empire to empire and require doing a cure event chain. Once cure found can also be shared. (Admitedly a whole bio warfare dlc would be cool. even add a new endgame crisis that does involve as much military). 2.) a hunt, like a leviathan class something or other that shows up randomly then vanish, empires that are larger/ stronger attract it so have a higher chance of seeing one. goes until someone kills it. 3.) Some pirate crisis beyond the regular pop-ups. like a miniature great kahn within your empire that only appears with low administration/high sprawl. 4.) military coup event.
- use the galactic community. right now there are blanket effects to -10% fleet capacity or some such thing. you could add decisions to set a limit of x fleet power and anything over that is halved. example set 400 fleet capacity limit. all nations under that are unaffected but a nation with 600 fleet cap will get 400 + (half of 200) = 500. could do similar things with economy like every energy credit surplus over 200 is halved (possibly with the other half going to the poorer nations or just to the senate itself) for certain projects. Senate forced tech sharing would also work as well to help bring all community members up to a certain level.
Anyway, please please please remove the growth limiters and if you need to balance the game add something that would be more fun for larger empires not less fun.
Edit:
Ok finished up my first game of dick update and moved on to a 2nd (which is modded to remove the pop growth limitations) and also did a lot more reading through forums and wanted to add more thoughts.
To clarify I don’t have an issue with the carrying capacity of planets although that system could use some work it is fundamentally ok. What I do have an issue with is increasing the growth time for each pop across the empire as slowing down progress is not fun.
If the number of pops needed to be limited for performance issues the size of planets should have been decreased and or make smaller worlds more likely to appear. This would limit growth in a more natural way.
Also as SpaceMarine4040 stated in response a slider would be better than just a toggle as I first thought. This would be a great compromise for game setup from 0 to 1 (or higher) so some of us can turn off but some people can keep it on at various levels.
Ok so only done one game so far and got about 2/3rds way through wanted to see how high I could push my population and went all out with fertility perks, baal questline, food surpluses, basically if I could get a half a percent faster growth rate I took it. Immersion was totally broken for me when it took me 2ce as long to half fill my 30th colony as it did to fully fill my first which was done before I had all those perks. Game might be running faster now but it felt so much slower. I have never liked the kind of balancing that punishes players who do well by watching ever increasing progress bars. Its satisfying to always improve. Furthermore I really like roleplaying in Stellaris and one of my favorites to roleplay as is the devouring swarm. Was planning to make that my second playthrough but with as crippling as the pop growth is that no longer seems like it would be any fun.
That said if the games need to be balanced there are other more interesting ways to do so. The best ways add bonuses to the players being left behind or add unique and interesting challenges to those who get ahead. Stellaris is uniquely set up to do the later with your quest system. You could add some event chain across your whole empire as it reaches a certain size that could be as devastating as some civil war or some mini crisis directed directly at your empire. An obstacle to overcome is so much better than some handicap, especially a handicap that increases wait times as the game goes on. As it stands going for a large sprawling empire is incredibly boring and a huge part of the game was just sacrificed for the sake of balance.
Some personal suggestions to improve balancing without slowing down growth or production times:
-Tweaking Admin caps. Right now base cap is so low that even small empires need to build admin buildings. Some increasing that and adjusting relevant civics would help the smaller empires without punishing larger ones too much. Also adding some risk to civil war, increased piracy, and government ethics avoidance if you pass up your cap as well as other interesting issues besides increasing tech and unity costs would help hold larger nations back. Also if you were limited to one admin building per planed it would reduce planet specialization and encourage players to wait on better building upgrades before colonizing but once they do colonize they can still build up faster than they did last time.
-Add more to the sectors system besides automation. I like the micromanagement more then most so sectors are merely symbolic to me beyond getting some governor bonuses. One thought is to have a sector loyalty that larger empires have to deal with. The core sector where your capitol is will always be loyal and provide government ethics attraction. But other sectors could provide an attraction to an alternate ethic that throws you off. The sectors can be staggered a little as well, (1 capitol sector, 2-3 core sectors, 5-8 distant sectors) with each level being harder to keep in line. Furthermore the new envoys could be used internally to keep sectors in line or externally to cause a larger nation's sectors to rebel. Since the number of envoys are not dependent on empire size this would help out the smaller nations.
-Re-add leader caps. Let me clarify. I do not want the hard leader caps we had before. My suggestion would be to have a starting cap of 1 governor, 4 scientist, 1 Admiral, and 1 general. I would have techs to expand the number of each of them by at least 2 to a base of 2,6,3,3 and also add a building type that can only be place on a sector capitol (academy). There would be different academy types. Political adds 2 governor slots. Science adds 2 scientist slots. Military adds 2 admiral and 1 general. This is sort of a middle ground, but this way larger empires can get their higher leader counts they need while giving the Smaller nations some base to fall back on without the need to waste building slots. Admittedly this would only curb the excessively large empires.
- increased ease of spying on larger empires. Bigger empires would have more weakpoints. This would not be to cripple the larger empires own envoys but give smaller empires more room to take down larger ones. also if another nation (besides fallen empires which I haven't even tried to spy on yet) have far higher tech, certain lower level tech should be easy grabs, as in if a nation has level 5 lasers you should almost by default be able to just absorb level 3 lasers off of them. Just like when you scan ships I would have just keeping an envoy spying on them pick up lower tier tech progress. this would keep most nations on a more or less equivalent tech level.
- make factions more annoying to deal with. In my latest game only had 5 factions at 700 pop and non of them represented an ethic opposite of my government. (was playing militaristic, authoritarian, materialist dictatorship). furthermore I had very high sprawl (about 600 and admin of only 450)
- Special events that only target larger empires. 1.) Plague - maybe have some diseases pop up from time to time. targeting specifically high populations. (or computer virus for machine empire) These could affect an individual species can be passed empire to empire and require doing a cure event chain. Once cure found can also be shared. (Admitedly a whole bio warfare dlc would be cool. even add a new endgame crisis that does involve as much military). 2.) a hunt, like a leviathan class something or other that shows up randomly then vanish, empires that are larger/ stronger attract it so have a higher chance of seeing one. goes until someone kills it. 3.) Some pirate crisis beyond the regular pop-ups. like a miniature great kahn within your empire that only appears with low administration/high sprawl. 4.) military coup event.
- use the galactic community. right now there are blanket effects to -10% fleet capacity or some such thing. you could add decisions to set a limit of x fleet power and anything over that is halved. example set 400 fleet capacity limit. all nations under that are unaffected but a nation with 600 fleet cap will get 400 + (half of 200) = 500. could do similar things with economy like every energy credit surplus over 200 is halved (possibly with the other half going to the poorer nations or just to the senate itself) for certain projects. Senate forced tech sharing would also work as well to help bring all community members up to a certain level.
Anyway, please please please remove the growth limiters and if you need to balance the game add something that would be more fun for larger empires not less fun.
Edit:
Ok finished up my first game of dick update and moved on to a 2nd (which is modded to remove the pop growth limitations) and also did a lot more reading through forums and wanted to add more thoughts.
To clarify I don’t have an issue with the carrying capacity of planets although that system could use some work it is fundamentally ok. What I do have an issue with is increasing the growth time for each pop across the empire as slowing down progress is not fun.
If the number of pops needed to be limited for performance issues the size of planets should have been decreased and or make smaller worlds more likely to appear. This would limit growth in a more natural way.
Also as SpaceMarine4040 stated in response a slider would be better than just a toggle as I first thought. This would be a great compromise for game setup from 0 to 1 (or higher) so some of us can turn off but some people can keep it on at various levels.
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