Sector Discussion Thread

[methegrate]

On account of the constant 'sectors are broken' derails that are infesting half the threads on this forum, we've decided to create a general thread for sector discussion and feedback. ... Our present view on sectors is that they more or less work okay.

My concern is that these things seem contradictory.

If half the threads on your forum are dedicated to "sectors are broken," I'm hard pressed to see this as a well functioning system. Certainly internet feedback should always be taken with a grain of salt, otherwise you risk changing for a vocal minority, but with sectors there's much to legitimately criticize.

The problem is that sectors do nothing to make Stellaris more fun. They ease game mechanics by carving out an enormous section of gameplay, but they don't replace it with anything meaningful. While AI issues are a pain, ultimately this is why so many players are so dissatisfied.

A 4x game follows a fairly standard arc: early land rush; development and economy building; push for victory. Sectors strip out that second phase and don't replace it with anything, which is why Stellaris is so often criticized for its slow middle game. The mid-game empire-building phase thus becomes less about running an empire than watching the computer run it for you.

@Darkath got it absolutely right:

From a game design perspective, you should clarify what is the place of sectors in the game :

1) They are semi-independant entities with their own "will" like CK2 vassals, and they should know how to play for/against the player effectively with their AI (and effectively take some control away from the player). This leads to emergent gameplay and story telling, as well as dynamic internal politics that complexifies over time. This would be great and i think this was the original intent behind the feature.

2) They are a tool to help the player manage his empire more effectively and reduce micro management : then they should absolutely never take control away from the player who should be able at all times to override the sector AI with his own commands (building something specific, purging, give and take ressource easily etc). This is less interesting as 1) but is closer to the feature that is in game right now. If the player is allowed to override the AI when he needs, then having a "perfect" AI is much less important.

As currently implemented sectors are the worst of both worlds. They forcibly take control from the player, and in doing so pull out the "empire building" gameplay while creating real frustration with AI limitations. At the same time, they don't add anything to justify that lost gameplay.

I completely agree that a system of fractious, personality driven territories as described above would be terrific, and is most likely what was intended. (Otherwise why require players to use a basic macromanagement tool?) But either way, the system isn't working and isn't any fun.

 

[Invictus5966]

Can anyone say what the priorities of sectors are in terms of builds?

IE...
1 - Build where pops don't have a building
2 - Improve buildings
3 - Build special buildings to improve happiness ect.
4 - Build and upgrade space stations
5 - Colonize


Is there any specific programming for this so I can see what I need to look at and expect?

 

[Blackplant]

I've seen quite a few people in this thread complain about taxation. To solve the tax and the stock pile issues, I have two ideas:

1) You should be able to take resources from a sector per button click so long as you leave at least half of the sector's maximum reserve so the sector can use the leftovers to build.
2) Turn the taxation from a 25% step system to a slider that caps out at about 90%.

The ideas are not really fleshed out, but they're a beginning.

 

[Bob_the_Insane]

Personally I think I would enjoy sectors more if I was still able to override the sector government's decisions. If I could still force the clearing of blockers and building for specific structures (spending empire resources to do so rather than sector resources) while planets were still in the sectors for taxation and automated management purposes.

I would also love the ability to take back energy and materials from Sectors..

To provide a counter to this it would be fair if those interference actions drove sector factions to seek independence...

Currently sectors feel more like a weight holding the player back rather than something fun and interesting to interact with...

That is my personal $0.02...

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Personally I think I would enjoy sectors more if I was still able to override the sector government's decisions. If I could still force the clearing of blockers and building for specific structures (spending empire resources to do so rather than sector resources) while planets were still in the sectors for taxation and automated management purposes.

I would also love the ability to take back energy and materials from Sectors..

To provide a counter to this it would be fair if those interference actions drove sector factions to seek independence...

Currently sectors feel more like a weight holding the player back rather than something fun and interesting to interact with...

That is my personal $0.02...

I agree that sectors need to be more involved and you need to be able to interact with them more. I don't think that you should be able to just claim their resources or decide unilaterally what they should build, not without a cost in influence or populations happiness penalties, depending on what you like to do.

I want sectors to become a real political entity and force you have to deal with, more like a separate legal entity all depending on your government and society at large. In realistic term the US government can't just reach into the states coffers without a huge political backlash or rioting in the streets. A sector or planet economy should basically be the same.

To be perfectly honest I would not even mind planets generally developing themselve and the player merely guiding the core worlds through edicts and the occasional interference using direct influence to force build a structure or two.

Planets and sectors should be its own economic entity which the player (as being the embodiment of the government) can't just dictate how to behave, develop or spend their resources. Every planet should keep their own energy and mineral stores with which to use to build stuff. Sectors and Empire coffers can be used for overarching or very expensive projects.... such as space stations and modules, colonization, terraforming, mining/reserach stations etc..

Each planet would pay a small tax of what they produce to the Sector and Empire treasuries, Sector and Empire can subsidize planet developments if they need to but there need to be some corruption or inefficiency factor to hinder perfect transferring of resources.

This is where government forms can have various effects. An Autocratic government would have an easier time forcing a planet to build in a specific way while having more corruption on trade and taxation. An individualistic society would become outraged if the government continually told them how to build in their societies.

I just don't think the player should have absolute control over planet development, it should be guided by the societies their empires represent. I want planet, sector and core system to develop dynamically depending on how the empire change over time. What species, ethics and other inspirational sources it encounter will dictate how the empire economy develops.

Less min/max and more dynamic interesting development would be nice.

 

[Constans337]

I don't think that you should be able to just claim their resources ..., not without a cost in influence or populations happiness penalties,

I think this only makes sense if there is a corresponding increase in influence and happiness when you give them resources. Currently, sectors sitting on huge stores and income of resources while the empire is in crisis (e.g. war) and resource starved makes no sense thematically or from a game play perspective.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

I think this only makes sense if there is a corresponding increase in influence and happiness when you give them resources. Currently, sectors sitting on huge stores and income of resources while the empire is in crisis (e.g. war) and resource starved makes no sense thematically or from a game play perspective.

Sure, I would agree with this. In realistic terms resources should not be stored for very long, there should ALWAYS be ways to reinvest resources. If not pure wasting of resources could just simply increase happiness... a rich sector will happily waste resources and make their pops happy just spending it on consumption.

During wars the government should be able to force edicts and/or empire wide policies and tap into wasteful spending of the sectors/planets and use those resources for war efforts. Obviously it would not make the population very happy...

As long as anything we as player do have some form of consequence I'm OK with it. Just perfectly transferring resources from one area to another is unrealistic and a wasteful opportunity to introduce meaningful choices into the game.

I could even see sectors in some empire cultures conducting minor wars with each other over bordering resources or old grievances. Conflicts an Empire need to deal with... conflicts that if not carefully handled could flare up in civil wars.

 

[Bob_the_Insane]

Another thought about the sector mechanism and how it impacts my game experience is the Core systems choice. A lot of the fun in my perspective is interacting with the new worlds you discover however managing your most advanced worlds and their ship production is also key. The limit to core systems currently creates this choice (once you have reached a certain size) between retaining direct control of your most advanced and productive worlds or giving up at least some direct control in favor of shaping the newly founded colonies.

Now you could put your most advanced worlds in a Sector and you can still interact with the space stations to improve them and build fleets, however the difficulty in monitoring that construction through the UI really discourages me from playing that way. You essentially have to memorize where you are building which ships. So in the end I just keep the 5 most advanced systems as my core ones and just drop new colonies straight into existing sectors after a while.

Oh, and a completely unrelated pet annoyance... Why if I am limited to 5 (+ some more with tech advances) core systems why can I dump any number of systems into a sector??

 

[Moogel]

In my current game my sectors are not building orbital stations or construction ships at all. Both have plenty of resources. Space construction is on for the sectors but no resource stations built by the AI. Space ports yes but thats it. Previous game was fine.

 

[Adamfostas]

There's no reason beyond geography or RP to make more than one enormous sector, and many good gameplay reasons why that approach is optimal. Given that sector limits are very high, this can't be working as intended. Give us more reasons to have more sectors and they'll be a more interesting mechanic

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

In my current game my sectors are not building orbital stations or construction ships at all. Both have plenty of resources. Space construction is on for the sectors but no resource stations built by the AI. Space ports yes but thats it. Previous game was fine.

Do they have enough of a positive energy surplus production?

Sectors will not build things that are expensive in energy maintenance if they don't have the energy production to maintain them. Sectors can't rely on you supplying them energy for maintenance, they need to be self sufficient in this regard. They also sometimes need allot of minerals stored before they build certain things.

 

[Malecord]

This is where government forms can have various effects. An Autocratic government would have an easier time forcing a planet to build in a specific way while having more corruption on trade and taxation. While an individualistic society would become outraged if the government continually told them how to build their societies.

In my opinion what you describe has less to do with autocracy / democracy government form and more with explicit centralization / decentralization culture. Take modern Europe: all states are democracies but then you have countries like Germany where local governments have lot of autonomy and then you have France and Italy where the central governments hold the majority of the power. Sometimes decentralization is an adaptation to the history. Germany was an invention of nationalism, before that Landers were autonomous countries of their own and often in war with each other. As it it centralization. France has been a single united country since long before nationalism... and one could say it even inspired it. Sometimes the same arguments works but in the opposite way. Italy also is an invention of nationalism and used to be split in several autonomous and often foreign controlled states. But the strict central control is deemed necessary to prevent divisions and -especially- foreign interference. Even today's Regioni borders for the most do not correspond to historical states and cultural zones that used to be before. One of the many brilliant solutions they adopted to dilute and erase those pre existing identities.

So imho being able to meddle with local power decision (and coffins) with impunity is more of a separated aspect of the ethos and government forms. For the rest of course autocracies will have local autocrats and democracies will have local parliaments. But their strength and autonomy depends on the overall centralized/decentralized culture they might have.

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

In my opinion what you describe has less to do with autocracy / democracy government form and more with explicit centralization / decentralization culture. Take modern Europe: all states are democracies but then you have countries like Germany where local governments have lot of autonomy and then you have France and Italy where the central governments hold the majority of the power. Sometimes decentralization is an adaptation to the history. Germany was an invention of nationalism, before that Landers were autonomous countries of their own and often in war with each other. As it it centralization. France has been a single united country since long before nationalism... and one could say it even inspired it. Sometimes the same arguments works but in the opposite way. Italy also is an invention of nationalism and used to be split in several autonomous and often foreign controlled states. But the strict central control is deemed necessary to prevent divisions and -especially- foreign interference. Even today's Regioni borders for the most do not correspond to historical states and cultural zones that used to be before. One of the many brilliant solutions they adopted to dilute and erase those pre existing identities.

So imho being able to meddle with local power decision (and coffins) with impunity is more of a separated aspect of the ethos and government forms. For the rest of course autocracies will have local autocrats and democracies will have local parliaments. But their strength and autonomy depends on the overall centralized/decentralized culture they might have.

Sure... different aspect will impact in different ways... that is what is so interesting. A democracy and autocracy would obviously function differently depending how much centralization or decentralization they have. Everything would be a factor in some way. I still think an autocracy would have an easier time making direct control in general than you have in a democracy, they do have different side effect from such interventions though.

 

[Foefaller]

I think one significant problem with how sectors work at the moment is that there is no benefit to using them. Instead, you have a penalty for not using them.

If there was some bonus to having sectors, especially multiple sectors, that wasn't easily accessible without them, I think there would be a lot less complaints about them not reading our minds and doing exactly what we would if we were in control. Influence, controlling ethics divergence, spending their extra resources on sector fleets that don't use our cap and the lend to us during wars... Give us a reason to make them other than the fact we lose 10% of our energy and influence production for each system over the cap.

 

[ergie]

Can anyone say what the priorities of sectors are in terms of builds?

IE...
1 - Build where pops don't have a building
2 - Improve buildings
3 - Build special buildings to improve happiness ect.
4 - Build and upgrade space stations
5 - Colonize


Is there any specific programming for this so I can see what I need to look at and expect?

This...
If you dont know the rules you cant evaluate the results. We need some kind of light about the sector Ai to give valid suggestions or catching bugs

 

[Stripes]

This...
If you dont know the rules you cant evaluate the results. We need some kind of light about the sector Ai to give valid suggestions or catching bugs

This was and is in demand since 1.0.0 release. The wagon is still there, as Russians say.

 

[Grimtalos]

The thing that scares me about Sectors is they are using the same AI the AI empires use to build their planets. Which shows you why the game is so easy, the AI has no idea how to build or work the tiles.

Sectors wont be fixed till the AI is fixed, Paradox need to sort it as their AI is awful.

In the end I dont think the AI will be fixed, I think they will just let us infurence Sectors more so we can override the brain dead AI.

I can see why Paradox marketted this as a MP game, as they could not get the AI to work at all.

Didnt Wiz mentioned before the game came out how good the AI was, haha

 

[GloatingSwine]

Sectors wont be fixed till the AI is fixed, Paradox need to sort it as their AI is awful.

Whilst I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, "AI is bad" is useless as feedback because you need to explain how and why the AI is bad. What specifically is it doing which is wrong, and how specifically do you envision it being fixed.

"AI is bad" is the sector AI of feedback.

You want do so something like this:

Now, for AI races one of the things it does badly is not using the Respect Tile Resources setting. Suppressing tile resources is only appropriate if the planet is heavily specialised or if they are surplus food. But when Respect Tile Resources is off the AI does not specialise planets, it just arbitrarily covers up resources with other basic production buildings, irrespective of what other tiles are free.

When Respect Tile Resources is on the AI will overbuild food even when the planet is full, and so possibly the AI should be running a calculation of how much food it can produce with the available tiles and the best food buildings it currently has, and attempting to produce enough food to fill the planet with the smallest possible surplus in the minimal number of tiles.

With that set, Respect Tile Resources should be on by default for the AI players, this would increase their overall resource output by stopping them from needlessly and unprofitably suppressing resources.

Another thing it doesn't do is match labs output to tiles, which leads to smaller bonuses when the planet has a production bonus for science. The only time this isn't appropriate is if the planet has pops with "Natural X" and this would produce a larger bonus than matching labs to tile. On the whole, the Respect Tile Resources setting should include matching labs to science resources though, this would allow higher overall bonuses.

Now, the next thing I'd like to see it be able to do is a little forward planning. It should at the very least build a building before a pop is fully grown, and use the time when pops are growing to clear tile blockers even if it hasn't already filled all its tiles yet.

It should prioritise a new building over upgrading an existing one too.

 

[Sorbicol]

Whilst I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, "AI is bad" is useless as feedback because you need to explain how and why the AI is bad. What specifically is it doing which is wrong, and how specifically do you envision it being fixed.

"AI is bad" is the sector AI of feedback.

You want do so something like this:

Now, for AI races one of the things it does badly is not using the Respect Tile Resources setting. Suppressing tile resources is only appropriate if the planet is heavily specialised or if they are surplus food. But when Respect Tile Resources is off the AI does not specialise planets, it just arbitrarily covers up resources with other basic production buildings, irrespective of what other tiles are free.

When Respect Tile Resources is on the AI will overbuild food even when the planet is full, and so possibly the AI should be running a calculation of how much food it can produce with the available tiles and the best food buildings it currently has, and attempting to produce enough food to fill the planet with the smallest possible surplus in the minimal number of tiles.

With that set, Respect Tile Resources should be on by default for the AI players, this would increase their overall resource output by stopping them from needlessly and unprofitably suppressing resources.

Another thing it doesn't do is match labs output to tiles, which leads to smaller bonuses when the planet has a production bonus for science. The only time this isn't appropriate is if the planet has pops with "Natural X" and this would produce a larger bonus than matching labs to tile. On the whole, the Respect Tile Resources setting should include matching labs to science resources though, this would allow higher overall bonuses.

Now, the next thing I'd like to see it be able to do is a little forward planning. It should at the very least build a building before a pop is fully grown, and use the time when pops are growing to clear tile blockers even if it hasn't already filled all its tiles yet.

It should prioritise a new building over upgrading an existing one too.

I think you've partially hit the nail on the head there. In my experience I will not hand over a planet to a sector until I have developed it to a point where it is ready - I've got the right buildings on the right tiles exploiting the right resources etc. My major issue with the Sector AI is that if I settle a new planet in a sector, the AI will make no attempt to develop that planet at all - no buildings, anywhere. It's quite happy for people to be unemployed while sitting on a cash/mineral stockpile that can be into the 1000s. Changing the settings or edicts to me at least doesn't appear to make much difference. Maybe I don't expand quick enough but by the time I am setting up sectors, I'll have either already built the solar mining stations/research stations required, or have a construction ship there ready to do it myself (after all, right clicking on the star in the galactic map and selection "build mining stations" is hardly that much of a onerous task).

The other issue I have is those stockpiles - I should be able to access them in an emergency. That or you should be able to set a limit on how much each stock pile should be and any excess is immediately handed over to your "global pile" for you to use. Supporting large navies is a very expensive business later in the game, one that I would be able to afford much more easily if I could access those stockpiles once in a while. Sure that could come with issues around the sector's happiness/productivity with direct interference to their budget, but having those resources sat their doing nothing if you are a financial crisis in the middle of a war makes little sense in game.

 

[telge2]

Could we add templates for spaceport? I generally don't let my sectors build their own spaceports, but I usually use the same modules, so if I could just set a template for them it would make me utterly happy.