My biggest gripe remains how we went from 25 max pops per planet to literally hundreds. The effect on end-game lag makes even micro-managing a tall empire a total nightmare.
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So the Tall play style is all but done away with now??
- Thread starter Vampiresoap
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A lot of the game suffers due to the new higher pops. Performance is a big one, purging is another. How pops grow is also unrealistically working against tall. Since planets grow pops, not pop grow pops, the easiest way to get more pops is to go wide. If you fixed pop growth you'd probably actually fix wide v tall pretty effectively, since having more planets doesn't mean you can easily staff all those planets.
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The hard part there is then balancing an early conquest of another home planet. If pops make pops, and you double your pops early, now you are ahead by 2x forever.
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Perhaps the right fix for that is to balance things like ethics/happiness/politics/etc. Yes, you have twice as many pops as anyone else. But half of those pops might cost more energy/minerals/alloys to keep in line than they produce; or they might make your empire politically ungovernable; or their ethics and sedition might spread throughout your empire making even your own pops unhappy; or they might actually generate negative research/unity/influence; or if you're at war there might always be a percent-chance that these pops seize the opportunity to rebel and declare for your enemy; or there might be a huge, long-lasting surge in piracy among neighboring systems, etc.
Right now things like ethics and happiness are easy to ignore. You interact with pops exclusively based on how many resources they produce. Even facially asymmetrical systems are weighted through the economy; happiness and politics are still all about a pop's production modifier. And in practice, even unhappy pops never cost more to maintain than they produce. So what do I care if a pop is unhappy? An unhappy pop still produces something, and a planet full of unhappy pops is still a net gain in production.
That might be the thing to fix. In a well-designed system, early conquest of another home planet would be an enormous gamble. Sure you get a huge boost to population, but you do so at the risk of having fully half your empire hate your guts.
For the empires that make that work, great. They earned their head start. But it should be quite possible, likely even, that doing this can cause your own empire to collapse as well.
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Oh, I absolutely agree with you. But you can see how huge of a balancing task that starts? By the time that’s all worked out we have another massive change like the one they did to the economy when they added resources. I’d love to see it, but it would be a major expansion, not just a patch, so I wouldn’t expect it any time soon.
I wish it would work like this, if you enable free migration it also slows down pop growth since they migrate elsewhere rather than stay on the one planet and thus that planet would grow faster.
The more pops on a planet the faster growth also becomes, which is natural.
Emigration from high population planets should give boost the growth more where they're going. If you have 10 full planets and colonize a 11th naturally the flow of immigrants would be larger than from 10 low population planets.
All in all, tall really isn't a playstyle anymore and I kind of like that it isn't despite it being fun for a while. The fact is wide just have all the natural benefits and should be the most optimal path.
The more pops on a planet the faster growth also becomes, which is natural.
Emigration from high population planets should give boost the growth more where they're going. If you have 10 full planets and colonize a 11th naturally the flow of immigrants would be larger than from 10 low population planets.
All in all, tall really isn't a playstyle anymore and I kind of like that it isn't despite it being fun for a while. The fact is wide just have all the natural benefits and should be the most optimal path.
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I'm not sure I'd agree that this would be an expansion in the DLC model. These are all fixes to existing systems, where DLC tends to be about adding new features or functions. More importantly, this would be about making existing systems work the way they were always intended to work. So I'd definitely think this would be a free update.
But I certainly agree right that it would be an overhaul on par with 2.0 or 2.2. Particularly given the limited scope of the diplomacy overhaul, a top-to-bottom politics and population update is probably unlikely.
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I'd rather they not be afraid of a big overhaul to create a system the game can properly function with, than to just keep trying to patch the current broken system over the next few years.
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No, no, I didn’t mean that the things we discussed would be the PAID part of an expansion, Just that they would occur WITH an expansion. Just like they always do. I’d expect the paid part would give new interactions with your pops such as edict and planetary decisions.
Well, they don’t seem to be scared of big changes. The FTL rework and economy reworks were massive changes .
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Oh, to be sure. No argument there. And that’s totally fine by me.
But I also agree, there’s no reason to expect it soon. If at all. The diplomacy update suggests that the devs may not be interested in big, sweeping changes anymore.
That's actually easy. Old Stellaris versions had a very simple solution to it - FTL drives on ships just cost a lot compared to all the other components for first 1-2 tech tiers. So if you wanted to defend yourself you could just strip the ships of FTL drives and have like 2 times the fleet size of your opponent as long as you didn't mind being unable to use it on attack until you upgrade the ships.
It also made stations much more resource effective in defensive position at the start.
You can even further enhance this approach by making both normal thruster and FTL drives being most of the ship cost at the game start.
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That doesn’t sound at all like something the AI would ever know when to do, or be able to implement well. Multiplayer only solutions aren’t enough.
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Actually it would. As AI measures the desire to attack something by its Fleet Strength. As such it won't attack stations or fleets with much higher strength. As FTL drives don't count into it AI will have no trouble at determining if it wants to take a shot at attacking a system. At least no more trouble than it has right now.
And if you mean using defensive only fleet without FTL that should be possible to add to AI behaviours through AI ship designer. Though it may need a couple tweaks.
Easy to create, sure. Easy to actually use effectively - much much harder.
When would it be a good time to have fleets of non-FTL ships? How much would they cost to maintain and can I afford it? These are processes the AI would need to think about to effectively use this without either completely ignoring it, or worse, sinking its economy on fleets it can't move anywhere. Given how it currently uses fleets as is, I'd imagine it would just add another complication that makes it worse.
There's also where to build them. They would require a shipyard station, as they can't travel, and the AI mostly spams anchorages on its stations, so that would need some logic to figure out. That's before we get into possible uses of it with a Juggernaut or megashipyard causing all kinds of horrible scenarios, where your non-FTL fleets are either banking up at the mega shipyard system, or being deposited piecemeal wherever the juggernaut flies.
I'm not against the idea, but I think you're underestimating the difficulty in implementing that correctly.
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The Dreadnought and Mega Shipyard should be irrelevant. As this is an early game mechanic and as you get into tier 3+ tech should be mostly irrelevant.
Yes, making AI to build them at a key station in a choke point will be pretty hard. But making it depending on "character" to build a defensive fleet in home system should be easy. Which will be upgraded to a normal one as AI gets further in tech.
Yes, making AI to build them at a key station in a choke point will be pretty hard. But making it depending on "character" to build a defensive fleet in home system should be easy. Which will be upgraded to a normal one as AI gets further in tech.
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Unfortunately the devs of this game have made playthrough styles increasingly bland - even playing as gestalt isn't really a massice difference, I mean woo, different resource management... there was a time in the early days where you could "rush" and take the planets of the closest empires in the first couple of years, which was hella fun. Unfortunately that ability was developed out of the game.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Stellaris desperately needs to take a look at RTS games like AOE2E and look at how many viable strats there are in game...you can fast castle, archer rush, go for scouts, knights, turtle and many others... and then there's the start variation like amount of resources you start with, tech level, nomad start etc etc... Stellaris is just SO damn bland for a game that, at its core, is a decade and a half newer that AOE2.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Stellaris desperately needs to take a look at RTS games like AOE2
E and look at how many viable strats there are in game...you can fast castle, archer rush, go for scouts, knights, turtle and many others... and then there's the start variation like amount of resources you start with, tech level, nomad start etc etc... Stellaris is just SO damn bland for a game that, at its core, is a decade and a half newer that AOE2.- 1
That's actually wrong, if you consider megacorps. Xenophile diplomancer megacorp can get stackable bonuses to diploweight and pop growth from corporate buildings and ridiculous energy income from branch offices. Running a federation as a diplomancer megacorp is totally viable. ATM federation can even wage wars without on its own with relative success.
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(One) big problem is the way pop growth works. As long as pops grows faster the more places they can grow on wide will always be better.
That was ok for the old pop system where pops cap out fast but not in the new system where your power is directly proportional to your pops with nearly no upper limit.
Just look at real world Russia. Under Stellaris rules it would be the most populus and powerful nation on earth. Yet it has hardly more people than Japan and fewer than Nigeria.
Pop growth should depend on your current number of pops, no matter if they are spread out or concentrated on a few planets (as long as the planets can support them). Eventually the wide empire will have more pops but that will take a while. Add in penalties for being wide like stability problems and tall vs. wide becomes a balance act instead of a nobrainer.
If you want to keep burocrats add a penalty to them. They lower the stability penalty, crime and thoughts if seccession on far away planets but give a penalty to science because if red tape (or make them consume science).
Expansion should be slowed down and you should be able to send expeditions for stuff beyond your border or for example be able, with massive investment, to tow disabled (L) gates etc. to your space.
That was ok for the old pop system where pops cap out fast but not in the new system where your power is directly proportional to your pops with nearly no upper limit.
Just look at real world Russia. Under Stellaris rules it would be the most populus and powerful nation on earth. Yet it has hardly more people than Japan and fewer than Nigeria.
Pop growth should depend on your current number of pops, no matter if they are spread out or concentrated on a few planets (as long as the planets can support them). Eventually the wide empire will have more pops but that will take a while. Add in penalties for being wide like stability problems and tall vs. wide becomes a balance act instead of a nobrainer.
If you want to keep burocrats add a penalty to them. They lower the stability penalty, crime and thoughts if seccession on far away planets but give a penalty to science because if red tape (or make them consume science).
Thats another problem. The map is filled too fast and you can only meaningfully interact with things within your own border.As an aside: one of the main drivers for me in pursuing a wide empire is that the wider you are, the more story things you have access too (anomalies, archaeological sites, leviathans, etc). If I'm a small empire I don't get to do/see as many of the fun things!
Expansion should be slowed down and you should be able to send expeditions for stuff beyond your border or for example be able, with massive investment, to tow disabled (L) gates etc. to your space.
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I do think the game could use more assimulation mechanics, atm, its a bit too easy to conquer and control new alien worlds.
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