Positive modifiers are too strong

[Curator Sapidianus]

While I understand that we want to feel an effect from bonuses gained from ethos, civics, techs and leaders the amount of various bonuses we can stack is upsetting the balance, favour the player too much and makes the game boring once we pass a certain threshold.

For example, it's too easy to stack happiness and forget about rebellions entirely, even as a slaver empire. For a player. AI never tries to minmax modifiers because of obvious reasons, which creates a situation, where AI empires that could've posed you a challenge in mid and late game are screwed by early game revolts due to inability to manage unrest and happiness. Players on the other hand continues to accumulate modifiers they want and reap the benefits easily avoiding any negative reprecussions.

A player can easily stack unity civics and building, get to the third point of ascension perks in 30-40 years (maybe even faster), grab +200 naval limit, then get rid of pacifism in favour of militarism, change civics and go roflstomp advanced AI on insane.

I can continue listing different examples of players optimizing their empires, but I think you got the point. What I believe we need to enjoy the game more is generally weakened positive modifiers and probably a bit stronger negative ones. Not every modifier needs to tweaked of course, let slaves provide 10% bonus output initially, but cut the bonuses from civics, techs, governors, edicts so that a slaver empire won't have a 50% bonus to minerals so soon. Maybe making modifiers stacks in a multiplicative manner could also help.

By making the power creep more subtle and steady we will achieve two things: first of all, players will enjoy the game more, builds will become more balanced and achieving the supreme status in the galaxy that causes eventual boredom will become harder, secondly ascensions and megas could be moved to earlier phase without upsetting the balance and Megastructures will actually matter.

 

[Alblaka]

Hmmm, I feel like this is a weird kind of view.

Yes, there are several imbalanced mechanics, especially Unity gain and Unrest. And certainly they need to be fixed somehow.

However, it strikes me as odd to claim that the positive modifiers are the sole culprit here. The modifiers could be fine, if the rest of the balance was accordingly.
I.e. it's okay to stack mineral gain to x00%, as long as that doesn't negatively impact the balance.

Therefore, I would refrain from saying 'nerf modifiers, they break the balance', but instead simply say 'do whatever is most reasonable to fix balance'. (Which, to be fair, is about as helpful as saying 'Do your job' or 'Make Stellaris great (again)'.)
Whether they do that by nerfing negative modifiers, or buffing negative modifiers or just changing any other element of the mentioned mechanics, is of no distinctive concern to me.

 

[Curator Sapidianus]

I wish to remind you about CK2, where stacking positive opinion with vassals was so easy, there was literally no revolts until pd cut modifiers in half

 

[Alblaka]

I wish to remind you about CK2, where stacking positive opinion with vassals was so easy, there was literally no revolts until pd cut modifiers in half

The alternative could have been doubling the cap of relations, and halving the effect of relations on everything in the game.
Same effect, different side of approach, albeit I'll admit that in that context, just halving the modifiers made a lot more sense in terms of invested effort.

However, for Stellaris I think that's not automatically true. I.e. Unity doesn't need the +1Unity/capital building reduced to 0.5, but instead a higher exponent on the scaling for Tradition Costs (or alternatively more Traditions, but, again, former is a much faster-to-apply bandaid then latter, though latter would undoubtly provide the better quality of content).

 

[Everstill]

Lol, I think the modifiers are really low, specially planets (modifiers are close to worhtless, they should Double planet modifiers).

I don't know why you want to reduce modifiers, because all the builds have good modifiers that make something in your empire OP.

You are more complaining about the poor AI than anything else.

 

[Guilliman88]

Next Patch (1.6) is a balancing/quality of life patch. Happiness bonuses are being nerfed a bit so I imagine other's will be looked at too.

 

[C4st1gator]

Coming from multiplayer I actually think the tradition modifiers are not bad. Getting certain traditions early allows you to theoretically get a headstart against the other players, and those are the ones that matter.
Strangely, the AI seems to be able to compete in science, despite over expanding and having on average a single lab on each planet. If anything is broken, the AI is. On one hand it seems to get boni to compete with the actual players, on the other it's as stupid as always. Plus asymmetrical and limited diplomacy: I want to trade with the AI, get rejected. AI then proceeds to make an even better (for me) offer, than I did.
There is one positive thing I can say about it, though: Sector AI has improved, as long as you don't expect it to do advanced stuff. At least I know what it wants to spend its minerals on, so I can take the role of a stern father and have some control over what gets build in a sector.

Also, if you stack happiness through living standards, it can and will take a significant chunk out of your general income. Repeatable mineral technologies make it more affordable over time, though.

 

[razaron]

Perdonally, I think some modifiers need a buff. Tech modifiers are fine, but trait, ethos and planet modifiers are lacking. A +15% trait isn't really playstyle affecting, considering you can easily get >40% for pretty much everything from non-trait sources.
Going from 100% to 115% is a 15% increase, but going from 140% to 155% is a 10.71% increase. In the late game, when you have all the Traditions and Technologies, Traits are just flavour.

Although that dissapointment is probably due the lack of multipliers. If planet, trait and ethos modifiers were multiplicative with other sources, that would add more flavour to the game.

The lack of multipliers also make stacking minus modifiers godlike.
Going from 100% to 90% is a 10% drop.
Going from 90% to 80% is a 11.11% drop.
Going from 80% to 70% is a 12.5% drop.

Every drop is exponentially better than the last, which is why they replaced Build Time with Build Speed. Currently I believe Growth Time is the only stat that benefits from reduction, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's replaced with Growth Speed.

Strangely, the AI seems to be able to compete in science, despite over expanding and having on average a single lab on each planet.

I think it's because the AI focuses on cheap techs and the tech level difference only takes into account number of techs, not aggregate base cost.

 

[Serenity84]

Some modifiers are fine, but happiness is way too easy to come by. I don't see why would ever need utopia living standards other than RPing.

 

[Aries666]

I kind of agree but mostly disagree. Stacking modifiers is what creates replayability for me in that each game becomes testing something to the extreme like getting battleships in 2240 by playing really compact and going silly on science modifiers. However, a little balancing could be useful in some cases and having certain AI personalities pursue a very streamlined progression could be interesting.

 

[Aries666]

Coming from multiplayer I actually think the tradition modifiers are not bad. Getting certain traditions early allows you to theoretically get a headstart against the other players, and those are the ones that matter.
Strangely, the AI seems to be able to compete in science, despite over expanding and having on average a single lab on each planet. If anything is broken, the AI is. On one hand it seems to get boni to compete with the actual players, on the other it's as stupid as always. Plus asymmetrical and limited diplomacy: I want to trade with the AI, get rejected. AI then proceeds to make an even better (for me) offer, than I did.
There is one positive thing I can say about it, though: Sector AI has improved, as long as you don't expect it to do advanced stuff. At least I know what it wants to spend its minerals on, so I can take the role of a stern father and have some control over what gets build in a sector.

Also, if you stack happiness through living standards, it can and will take a significant chunk out of your general income. Repeatable mineral technologies make it more affordable over time, though.

This could be a case of the AI picking the discovery tradition. Doing so and surveying lots of worlds means you always have research stockpiled and thus double research.