To my eye, there seem to be two problems with sectors; the first is that players don’t really want to form them, and the second is that the sector AIs aren’t really good at running them, building poorly and badly mismanaging pops.
Obviously the first problem is caused to some extent by the second, but I think there’s still a lot of scope for mechanics that would make players want to put up with suboptimal or poor sector management AI anyway (though I’ll return to poor sector management AI later), and not feel as penalized for not doing so as they do under the current system where you have a core planet limit and progressively increasing penalties for breaching it. Moreover, there’s definite scope for encouraging the formation of multiple sectors rather than one giant sector, as currently the two are mostly equivalent.
The key, I think, is to make it so that
players are rewarded for forming sectors and for breaking up larger sectors (through more interesting gameplay and gameplay bonuses) rather than
not being penalized for forming sectors or having giant sectors. Obviously those two are
mechanically equivalent (you end up getting more for doing something than for not doing something), but
psychologically getting a reward for doing something feels a lot better than not being punished for not doing it. Here are some suggestions, listed to form a kind of menu or palette for Paradox to choose from rather than creating an integrated full overhaul:
Happiness: One major reason for forming “sectors” (that is, decentralizing) in the real world is because people are generally happier when most of their day-to-day interactions with government are with local government organs that they can influence relatively easily rather than with distant central governments. For example, one major cause for the American Revolution was that the British were attempting to centralize some power in London that Americans had traditionally experienced as stemming from their local governments. There’s already a mechanic for “distance to capital” in the game, but it’s used to calculate ethics divergence. I propose that an additional “distance to sector capital” mechanic be added, and that both be used to calculate a bonus to planet happiness (generally small) from creating a sector. The farther away a planet is from the imperial capital and the closer it is to the sector capital, the happier it will be to have a local government (up to a fairly small cap, 5-10%). This would both encourage the formation of sectors (since happier pops are more productive and are less likely to form factions) and encourage breaking up large sectors (since the bonus falls off the farther away from a sector capital the planet is, so a large sector will usually not boost happiness very much).
Furthermore, this might be a way to handle aliens or synthetics in your empire. If you form a sector which is mostly populated by them, then they receive a small happiness bonus (“autonomy”). If you then appoint a governor from their species, they receive a larger one (“self-government”). This could be particularly useful if you’ve recently conquered an area or assimilated a vassal, due to the happiness penalty of doing so. Operating similarly with synthetics, by granting them autonomy and self-government could reduce the severity and probability of the AI rebellion and increase the probability of positive rebellion-related events.
Production efficiency: Another reason for forming “sectors” in the real world is that it becomes increasingly cumbersome to manage far-flung provinces from an imperial capital rather than allowing local governments and organizations to direct To some extent this is in the game, but it’s implemented as an increasing penalty rather than a benefit, and one that’s flat across your empire. I propose again leveraging the capital distance mechanic and creating a fairly small production boost for planets from creating a sector, with the size of the boost again related to the distance from the sector capital. Like the previous bonus, this would mean that creating sectors and splitting them up would be advantageous, since your overall empire would have more resources to use than before.
Alternatively, this could be considered as tied up with a happiness benefit, if that is implemented (since happiness gives a production boost), and eliminated.
Influence and Leaders: One major benefit of decentralized governments in the real world is that the local governments of each area or region serve as breeding grounds for politicians and other leaders. For instance, see how Barack Obama got his start in politics in the Illinois State Senate, then won a Senate seat from Illinois, then became the President of the United States. Or how Ronald Reagan became governor of California and, like Obama, then became President. Some American states also fund scientific research, for instance the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas, which is actually the second largest funder of cancer research in the United States (behind the National Cancer Institute and the other National Institutes of Health).
In game, this could be represented as a bonus to influence gain, making it a bit easier for you to buy new leaders from time to time, as a boost to the number of leaders you can have (probably less than one per sector, so that the sector governors aren’t “free”), or in random events that can cause new governors or scientists to appear from time to time, the way new admirals sometimes appear after fleet battles.
Politics: Another feature (or “feature”) of decentralized government is that it often involves a lot of bickering and competition between regions. Local governors and leaders will compete with other governors and leaders to benefit their region and, sometimes, become the imperial ruler instead of the current ruler (or, to put it different, become the Caliph instead of the Caliph). This can be fairly tame, as with states in the United States competing with tax breaks and policies to attract businesses, or it can be very cutthroat, as in…well, Paradox already has a game that’s all about that sort of thing, after all.
Something quite as complicated as CK2 would be unrealistic, obviously, but the amount of politics within sectors—and not just separatist rebellions!—could certainly be ramped up. I propose that each leader be given a home planet and a personal ethos which may or may not differ from your own (it would be based on a pop from that home planet). The ethos would affect their management of the sector (I imagine that their ethos would partially overwrite the government ethos, for example a Militarist governor in a Pacifist empire would eliminate the +10% food bonus), and might serve as a target for ethos divergence/convergence if it’s different from your own; this would create a tradeoff between appointing competent governors with the wrong ethos and incompetent ones with the right ethos.
Furthermore, each governor has a “personal power base” score that represents how much influence they have over the sector—compare some newbie just sent out from the capital who has no idea how things work day-to-day out on the frontier to someone who grew up out here and who rose up through local politics. The personal power base score would increase over time and would start off higher for governors of the same species as the majority population of the sector and for governors from a planet within the sector. Having a higher personal power base would increase the bonuses of the governor somewhat (they have the influence and knowledge to get things done), but would also increase the likelihood of them rebelling or attempting coups d’etat (particularly if they have a different ethos from you). So acting like many historical governments and appointing governors to far-flung provinces and moving them frequently would be beneficial, but at the same time leaving the same person in place for a long time would also be beneficial.
Another feature to go along with this would be sector-specific policies and edicts, occupying a middle ground between planetary edicts and imperial edicts, and policies aimed at your relationship with your sectors, analogous to the crown laws of CK2. For example, you could have sector governors be appointed (as now), be hereditary (a feudal system), or be electoral, like your overall government. Each of these would have benefits and penalties; an electoral system will tend to pacify the sector population, for example, but you would have less control over who runs the sector. There could be associated factions to modify these laws as well, and you could decentralize power to appease sector separatists. Connected with this, it would be good if your leaders could also create factions and try to bring other governors on board, centered on these types of laws.
All of these new political factors to sector management would make the game more complex and interesting, particularly in the mid-game where currently things start to slow down a bit due to the end of colonization and war and the exhaustion of early game event chains. They’re way too much for a simple patch, but they could make a nice major DLC, and would be pretty fun if they could be made to work properly.
As a quick note, I don’t really like the hard limit on the number of sectors (as you might have guessed). I think the fact that sectors require governors and governors cost influence is enough reason to limit the number of sectors, even without a hard cap, so that offering bonuses for splitting up sectors is enough to create a tradeoff—do I get the bigger bonus from more sectors, or do I save the influence I banked from handling fewer leaders to pay for other things, like edicts or frontier outposts or vassal annexations or the like?
Anyway, those are some ideas for making players
want to create sectors. Now, on to making sectors
work better. The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that the sector AI is not really very good at developing and managing planets. It might be possible to handle this by making the AI better at doing so, which I think could be done by having a fairly static method of developing planets. Even if it’s very hard to make the AI perform
optimally, performing
decently, and probably better than a lot of players who don’t have a solid grasp of the mechanics, certainly seems possible. The task list might look like this:
- Develop enough farms to feed one pop for every planet tile first, starting with food tiles adjacent to the capital and moving through other food tiles, food/other resource tiles, and blank tiles. Clear any tile blockers over food tiles before building on food/other resource tiles, similarly for tile blockers over food/other resource tiles, finally tile blockers on empty tiles.
- Develop enough power plants to power one building per tile on the planet second, starting with energy tiles adjacent to the capital and moving through other energy tiles, energy/other resource tiles, and blank tiles. Again, clear tile blockers if possible before moving on to another tile type.
- Develop any remaining mineral tiles. Clear blockers if necessary.
- Develop any science tiles. Clear blockers if necessary.
- If there are blank tiles remaining, check the sector specialization. If minerals, build mines and/or a mineral processing plant (if available fully-upgraded version would create a larger net mineral increase than another mine). If energy, build power plants and/or a power hub (same caveat). If science, build labs, evenly distributed among all three types. If military, split between all three.
This would not produce an
ideal planet by any means, nor a (very) specialized one, but it will produce a
decent, well-rounded planet that will balance out in energy costs, be able to feed itself at full population, and not do terribly at extracting value from its specialized tile types, in other words about 80 or 90% of what the player would get from an optimized planet, and for much less work (from the player). To complement this, allow players to override the AI for an influence cost and create a build queue themselves; this is functionally in the game already, if you remove the planet from a sector, fiddle with the build queue, and then put it back in the sector afterwards, so it’s not precisely a major (gameplay) change. If you wanted to get fancy, it could dynamically choose between farms and power plants based on the number of robots/droids/synthetics on the planet.
The other major thing that needs to be done is to improve pop management. I don’t have any detailed ideas here; the AI should just try to make sure that every pop on a planet is assigned to the tile which is most optimal for it, i.e. for which it provides the biggest benefit. I’m not sure how complicated that is to code, but it is very important—I assume that the other empires are also using this AI, so doing so would make them more competitive without making them cheat or otherwise bend the rules. Again, the player should be able to fiddle with this at an influence cost.
There are some useful quality of life improvements that could be done, too. A management page that lists spaceports and allows me to interact with them without having to warp to each planet individually, for instance, removing Observation Posts from sector control, and putting colony ships, which the sectors don’t seem to be able to use, in my control and in my outliner rather than leaving them floating around and having to manually keep track of them.
I know this post is a bit long, but I really tried to think of everything I could that sectors could do to be more interesting without making the player feel as if he or she is being punished, and to make them work better. I hope it's useful!
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