Hello,
After spending really a lot of time on EU4 and CK2 and some time on HoI4, I decided I want to try Stellaris. After all, I am an avid sci-fi fan irl
But also the game looks appealing. After I conquered many times the world in these three games, what can be better than conquering the whole galaxy?
However, there are certain things I don't like in the game.
For tl;dr version of the request, please skip the spoiler part, I just wrote the intro to share what bothers me in the game, which might help understand what sort of mods I'm looking for.
I am asking if there are mods to address the following issues in this order:
1. Automanagement has to be reduced, I wanna be focus more on strategies to conquer the galaxy rather than moving 1 employed pop from 50 planets to 1 and updating buildings. Late game this takes too much time and there are no significant benefits in not having this thing automated.
2. Autoupdating - for autoupdate of buildings I saw AutoBuild mod, which seems nice, I haven't yet tested it.
3. Automatic planet specialization - "mineral planet" is something every player in this game knows what it is, there aren't many options, it would be nice if there was a mod for this.
4. AI improvements both in strategy and tactics and pathfinding....
5. Some sort of diplomacy overhaul which makes diplomacy relevant
6. Some sort of factions overhaul that makes them relevant for the gameplay. The idea is great - factions, if left unattended should be able to alter your politics and force you into things
7. UI mod - I understand those are generally harder and sometimes impossible to make, but if there are mods to fix some of the issues and optimizing the experience, it would be nice. The outliner is nice if I play on phone, but I play on 40' screen. I have plenty of space to put all the menus separately, instead of stupid scrolling. And need to keep track of things somehow.
For me to do world conquest the most needed are the first 3 mods because I don't really wanna be spending good 20-30 min every once and then on pause, moving pops and autoupdating buildings or doing straighforward planet specialization. They are purely QoL and this is what I feel lacks most for good gameplay. The fourth is nice to enhace war experience, while 5 and 6 could add some more layers of gameplay. 7 is optional
So, I'd appreciate if your help
After spending really a lot of time on EU4 and CK2 and some time on HoI4, I decided I want to try Stellaris. After all, I am an avid sci-fi fan irl
But also the game looks appealing. After I conquered many times the world in these three games, what can be better than conquering the whole galaxy?However, there are certain things I don't like in the game.
For tl;dr version of the request, please skip the spoiler part, I just wrote the intro to share what bothers me in the game, which might help understand what sort of mods I'm looking for.
1. Micromanagement - I have noticed that this is apparently an issue with the game after searching in google. But here's my experiense:
The game is enjoyable early game, until you have very limited number of planets to manage. Once you enter mid game, the game becomes tedious, and in late game, it is barely playable. If you play on huge galaxy map and want to atempt to conquer it all, the micromanagement is a hussle. I don't understand why buildings don't update themselves or why excessive pops on one planet don't search job on another planet, which has jobs for 50 pops. Or why it doesn't resettle automatically, if you allow forced resettlement. The feature to move pops from planet to planet looks interesting on paper, but in reality it becomes a hassle. I mean, there's no decision to make - keeping extra unemployed pop on one planet is not an option, and while it might be important to choose where that pop has to go, when you have over 20 planets with edicts for pop increase, all you gotta do is moving pops from your first planets, which are already maxed, to another ones. I don't understand why it can't be automatic - for example set a planet as priority and extra pops go there, even if that costs resources. A huge galaxy can easily contain 100+ planets and more planets you get, more you need to move pops and update buildings which consumes the whole gameplay, instead of focusing on the grand plan.
The division per sectors would be nice, if you could make a focus on these sectors, which actually work. The automanagement is not performing well, and I don't understand why. Developing "mineral planet" is something which, as far as i can see from reading in internet, has always been a meta in the game, so I don't understand why the AI can't be set to do it properly. If the game doesn't give you option to, let's say, set such a focus, you could at very least be able to make development templates for planets and apply them. In the same way, updating the ships is horrible experience once your fleet grows, unless you wanna bother build cluster of shipyards in a cluster and manually split the fleet in many small pieces and distribute it. It is silly. Every single change you make to the template requires tons of time to implement otherwise, this should be automatic.
2. The UI - while not as bad as the complete lack of UI in HoI4 plane deployment which sometimes makes you search where you have deployed planes, the UI in Stellaris seriously needs improvements. The outliner is probably a good example - once planets and fleets start piling up, you waste too much time scrolling and searching what you actually need, with the sectors, it makes almost every planet or group of planets, take twice the space... and when you have 50-100 planets, that's a lot of scrolling.... Then bulding gates on 2 stages is nice, unless you forget where you have built the base. Sometimes when I build many gates in the same time, I don't always have enough energy to make them all work in the same time, so they need to wait. However, I can forget in which system it's built, so to fix this issue, I often have to keep the engineer ship there. This is silly strategy but sorta works, since I haven't seen any other way to do it.
3. The AI is dumb - it is true that neither in EU4, nor in CK2, the AI was some sort of a genius, but I think in Stellaris it is much worse than anything else. I've had multiple cases where I go to war against somebody stronger, that person has a lot of ship power, for example 3-4 fleets with 70k each. I have noticed that once I have a single 80-100k fleet, it's pretty to lure him to attack me with one fleet at a time. Sometimes literally all you have to do is capture the system near his fleet, then move back, then he will retake it with one 70k fleet, then you can attack, in other cases you can just wait one or two systems from his fleet and for some reason he will attack you with one fleet. Now I don't understand why this is made so bad, given that in stellaris, due to the nature of hyperlanes, you really don't have that many options to move around, it should be easier to program a decent AI than in other games.
My second issue with the AI is that it is stupidly aggressive sometimes, without a clear goal. In HoI4 it was an issue that once you step back from a frontline with a tile, inferior enemy will attempt to cross the line, and if you attack in the same time, you can farm quite a lot of experience, which basically defeating the enemy as he had ff-ed his defensive bonuses. Well, something similar happens in Stellaris with what I described above. In addition, the AI seems to lack overal goal to where to point his aggressiveness. In a war if you leave few systems near his borders undefended, he will roam them and conquer them, while in the meantime you can assault his planed. The lack of ability to prioritize and evaluate is bad for the gameplay and it makes simple and silly strategies for some reason work all the time.
4. The diplomacy is useless. Doing anything costs influence, which is also needed to expand, so you might just skip it altogether. Expanding too fast doesn't seem to bother other empires like in EU4 where they'd form coalitions. Forming alliances is not as important as in HoI4, you can't gang on a single empire. In the 10-20 games I played, I barely needed to engage in diplomacy except when declaring wars. Entering in all sort of agreements seems more of a penalty and the compensation you get from some factions are not enough to compensate it
5. Factions seem redundant - they are not as fun as CK2 factions, I don't find them nearly as important either. Balancing between your vassals while expanding was the real thing in CK2, and we all know how fast your empire could go to shit if you made a mistake. Now we have factions here which can be eliminated with 1 click and pleased with another 2-3 clicks... Not to mention it is not exactly intuitive to understand what they want - sometimes I think I fullfill their requirements, but they don't agree. Since I don't understand always ther request and the whole system is unimportant for the gameplay, at some point I just stopped bothering.
I understand that many people would play the game specifically for the first three points and that's totally ok. People set their own goals, for me - I've always enjoyed world conquests that will be soon 30 years goal, since in 1992 I started playing PC games with Civilization 1. While I haven't really bothered playing civilization after 4th installment, which for me is the best, I have to point out that this game is perfect example of how you can you implement micromanagement in the game play, without making it annoying, something that Stellaris fails at least in my opinion.
The game is enjoyable early game, until you have very limited number of planets to manage. Once you enter mid game, the game becomes tedious, and in late game, it is barely playable. If you play on huge galaxy map and want to atempt to conquer it all, the micromanagement is a hussle. I don't understand why buildings don't update themselves or why excessive pops on one planet don't search job on another planet, which has jobs for 50 pops
. Or why it doesn't resettle automatically, if you allow forced resettlement. The feature to move pops from planet to planet looks interesting on paper, but in reality it becomes a hassle. I mean, there's no decision to make - keeping extra unemployed pop on one planet is not an option, and while it might be important to choose where that pop has to go, when you have over 20 planets with edicts for pop increase, all you gotta do is moving pops from your first planets, which are already maxed, to another ones. I don't understand why it can't be automatic - for example set a planet as priority and extra pops go there, even if that costs resources. A huge galaxy can easily contain 100+ planets and more planets you get, more you need to move pops and update buildings which consumes the whole gameplay, instead of focusing on the grand plan. The division per sectors would be nice, if you could make a focus on these sectors, which actually work. The automanagement is not performing well, and I don't understand why. Developing "mineral planet" is something which, as far as i can see from reading in internet, has always been a meta in the game, so I don't understand why the AI can't be set to do it properly. If the game doesn't give you option to, let's say, set such a focus, you could at very least be able to make development templates for planets and apply them. In the same way, updating the ships is horrible experience once your fleet grows, unless you wanna bother build cluster of shipyards in a cluster and manually split the fleet in many small pieces and distribute it. It is silly. Every single change you make to the template requires tons of time to implement otherwise, this should be automatic.
2. The UI - while not as bad as the complete lack of UI in HoI4 plane deployment which sometimes makes you search where you have deployed planes, the UI in Stellaris seriously needs improvements. The outliner is probably a good example - once planets and fleets start piling up, you waste too much time scrolling and searching what you actually need, with the sectors, it makes almost every planet or group of planets, take twice the space... and when you have 50-100 planets, that's a lot of scrolling.... Then bulding gates on 2 stages is nice, unless you forget where you have built the base. Sometimes when I build many gates in the same time, I don't always have enough energy to make them all work in the same time, so they need to wait. However, I can forget in which system it's built, so to fix this issue, I often have to keep the engineer ship there. This is silly strategy but sorta works, since I haven't seen any other way to do it.
3. The AI is dumb - it is true that neither in EU4, nor in CK2, the AI was some sort of a genius, but I think in Stellaris it is much worse than anything else. I've had multiple cases where I go to war against somebody stronger, that person has a lot of ship power, for example 3-4 fleets with 70k each. I have noticed that once I have a single 80-100k fleet, it's pretty to lure him to attack me with one fleet at a time. Sometimes literally all you have to do is capture the system near his fleet, then move back, then he will retake it with one 70k fleet, then you can attack, in other cases you can just wait one or two systems from his fleet and for some reason he will attack you with one fleet. Now I don't understand why this is made so bad, given that in stellaris, due to the nature of hyperlanes, you really don't have that many options to move around, it should be easier to program a decent AI than in other games.
My second issue with the AI is that it is stupidly aggressive sometimes, without a clear goal. In HoI4 it was an issue that once you step back from a frontline with a tile, inferior enemy will attempt to cross the line, and if you attack in the same time, you can farm quite a lot of experience, which basically defeating the enemy as he had ff-ed his defensive bonuses. Well, something similar happens in Stellaris with what I described above. In addition, the AI seems to lack overal goal to where to point his aggressiveness. In a war if you leave few systems near his borders undefended, he will roam them and conquer them, while in the meantime you can assault his planed. The lack of ability to prioritize and evaluate is bad for the gameplay and it makes simple and silly strategies for some reason work all the time.
4. The diplomacy is useless. Doing anything costs influence, which is also needed to expand, so you might just skip it altogether. Expanding too fast doesn't seem to bother other empires like in EU4 where they'd form coalitions. Forming alliances is not as important as in HoI4, you can't gang on a single empire. In the 10-20 games I played, I barely needed to engage in diplomacy except when declaring wars. Entering in all sort of agreements seems more of a penalty and the compensation you get from some factions are not enough to compensate it
5. Factions seem redundant - they are not as fun as CK2 factions, I don't find them nearly as important either. Balancing between your vassals while expanding was the real thing in CK2, and we all know how fast your empire could go to shit if you made a mistake. Now we have factions here which can be eliminated with 1 click and pleased with another 2-3 clicks... Not to mention it is not exactly intuitive to understand what they want - sometimes I think I fullfill their requirements, but they don't agree. Since I don't understand always ther request and the whole system is unimportant for the gameplay, at some point I just stopped bothering.
I understand that many people would play the game specifically for the first three points and that's totally ok. People set their own goals, for me - I've always enjoyed world conquests that will be soon 30 years goal, since in 1992 I started playing PC games with Civilization 1. While I haven't really bothered playing civilization after 4th installment, which for me is the best, I have to point out that this game is perfect example of how you can you implement micromanagement in the game play, without making it annoying, something that Stellaris fails at least in my opinion.
I am asking if there are mods to address the following issues in this order:
1. Automanagement has to be reduced, I wanna be focus more on strategies to conquer the galaxy rather than moving 1 employed pop from 50 planets to 1 and updating buildings. Late game this takes too much time and there are no significant benefits in not having this thing automated.
2. Autoupdating - for autoupdate of buildings I saw AutoBuild mod, which seems nice, I haven't yet tested it.
3. Automatic planet specialization - "mineral planet" is something every player in this game knows what it is, there aren't many options, it would be nice if there was a mod for this.
4. AI improvements both in strategy and tactics and pathfinding....
5. Some sort of diplomacy overhaul which makes diplomacy relevant
6. Some sort of factions overhaul that makes them relevant for the gameplay. The idea is great - factions, if left unattended should be able to alter your politics and force you into things
7. UI mod - I understand those are generally harder and sometimes impossible to make, but if there are mods to fix some of the issues and optimizing the experience, it would be nice. The outliner is nice if I play on phone, but I play on 40' screen. I have plenty of space to put all the menus separately, instead of stupid scrolling. And need to keep track of things somehow.
For me to do world conquest the most needed are the first 3 mods because I don't really wanna be spending good 20-30 min every once and then on pause, moving pops and autoupdating buildings or doing straighforward planet specialization. They are purely QoL and this is what I feel lacks most for good gameplay. The fourth is nice to enhace war experience, while 5 and 6 could add some more layers of gameplay. 7 is optional
So, I'd appreciate if your help
