Stellaris Dev Diary #174 - Federations is out, now what?

[rubert]

We are very interested in hearing your feedback and ideas regarding Federations, and if there was anything you would have wished for us to add.

User interface improvements:
a) Troop recruitment, colony ship building, resettlement etc. are still a mess if you are playing a Xenophile empire (even without Xeno-compatibility).
b) Finding good locations for potential branch offices is difficult.
c) In general keeping track of planets is difficult. Some sort of a master list of all planets/systems with different filters would be great: owned by me, owned by empire X, colonizable, branch office possible etc.
d) Improved Outliner: customize display order of planets, hide starbases/planets/branch offices which don't require any any attention (eg. no free slots, no unemployed pops etc) etc.

 

[Methone]

Make it so stopping pop growth (entirely) on a planet just boosts growth on all the others (by the same amount divided) so we can all stop the micro

It's supposed to. That's why the Pop Controls decision comes with a ton of Emigration Push.

A planet with max Emigration sends 95% of its pop growth away to planets that can receive it. The problem is, in the case of Pop Controls, this is bugged. Pop Controls sets pop growth to 0. And 95% of 0 is 0.

 

[BlackUmbrellas]

I think we all know thats probably not going to happen. If it does, it would be great of course. But since its likely not going to happen, having the best event with slightly off text is better than having no event at all. Who cares if 5 lines of text don't match, its not like you read every sentence after you encountered this event 2 times already. Its simply the fastes way for more content and fun for the player.

So just mod it, then, if you don't care about it being apropriately polished.

 

[faszi]

Here some suggestions from me... 2 and 3 would be soooooo nice..


1.) A "Restart Game" Button.

I restart my games several times until i get a system that fits my needs. It would be very nice to have a button where i can restart my game immediatly. no need to "end game" -> "start new game" -> "choose race" -> "click play".

maybe auto-save could start at day 2 - so i don't have to delete all the "fail-start-games" ...


2.) "Encourage Planetary Growth" for all planets at once!

An overview with all my planets - or just a button! - where i can activate "Encourage Planetary Growth" for all of them at once. no more need to click through 50++ planets.... my pop have the "intelligent" attribute.. they should be able to understand "do it on all planets".


3.) Auto resettle unemployed pops to a specific planet

a function that automatically resettle my unemployed pops to a specific planet.. they should be able to do that without the emperor (thats me!) watching them..


4.) Game Option: Disable Habitats

An option called "Disable Habitats"! They are just *****. A.I. is spamming so much of them. there is a reaseon i play with 0.25 habitable worlds.


5.) Make Fallen Empires stronger again..

or add at least one fallen empire per game thats even stronger than the rest...



Please give us at least Point 2 and 3. It's really frustrating to invest the most time into clicking through all the planets to activate "Encourage Planetary Growth" and resettle the unemployed... it takes away all the fun if your empire grow to a certain size...


thanks in advance !

 

[schnupfi]

Fix multiplayer desyncs

 

[Mímisbrunnr]

A few requests/suggestions....

1.) It would seem that tier 3 admin buildings are bugged and can't be built right now. Can you please fix this.

2.) It would seem that trade league policies don't give the correct amount of energy - can you fix this please.

3.). Would it be possible to tighten the turning radius of the strike craft - it would prevent them from losing as much damage duet to their swarming movement power and making their actual in-practice damage output closer to their nominal damage output.

4.) I had a weird glitch (entirely unmoved) when the Racket caravan triggered the cross-breed event on a tomb world planet inhabited by Lithoids - instead of getting hybrids, it gave me 3 robots instead.

Thanks! While there are a few bugs, 2.6 has been going great overall thus far. Playing unmodded, on Commodore. AI is clearly far more competent than before - while it has made some questionable moves, overall its a nice improvement.

 

[UltimateTobi]

I'd love for the AI also to propose changes to federation laws. Is that planned? Or just very rare and I haven't encountered it?

 

[princeseth]

Could we have some tutorials about Federations and especially the Galactic community ? In my current game i cant propose anything to be voted and as far i can see all the other empires propose sanctions laws all the time which i have no clue if i should support them or not ... i am confused about how all this works ...

 

[aantia]

It would be nice if the AI was a little more willing to buy favours and use them in the Galactic Community; that would make votes a little less predictable (although they aren't bad now).
It might also be good if the cost of buying favours scaled with the diplo power of the seller, since it seems reasonable that more valuable favours should be more expensive.

 

[Koopatin]

Still feel envoys and favours are too powerful. Unless there is an exterminator, devouring swarm or something it feels like nobody would ever declare war on me unless I want to through sending no envoy. And favours "only" give you 5 each favour more opinion for joining a federation, or become my protectorate and so on it was most of the time enough, in combination with envoys and presents anyway.

 

[Fox McCloud]

Will the Trade League Trade Policy bug be fixed?

This is a pretty major bug, impact wise, but is relatively simple to fix.

 

[Teja83]

Hi,

first of all nice job with federations, it gives especially the mid-game a lot more flavor!
The music, the artwork for events/anomalies are very good, and the AI improved too!


What I would like to see for a next patch, is a review/update on the ethic distribution/management.


Update: GC-laws for certain ethics, like pushing the galactic community away from xenophobe or militaristic.


Review: Currently I feel the Ethic/faction-system is not quite were it should be, the actions you can take to influence the ethics distribution don´t get the response you would imagine:

(1) the support of some factions seem to be locked/inflexible as you cannot change many of their supporting reasons
(example egalitarian support: "contact with egalitarian empires"...; "active faction";...)
Regardless if you suppress them, push other ethics, or strengthen the governing ethics, there is no way to get them reliably down in support in 20,50 or even 100years.

(2) I do not see my colonies afar from the capital have more spread, the tool tip of each pop which ethic they prefer is also around the same everywhere in your empire

(3) it would be nice to influence more specific ethics on a planetary level (through planetary decision for example)

 

[Mímisbrunnr]

Oh, I forgot to mention - can you please make Colony Number and System Number show up in the interface again? It used to in 2.5 and earlier. You can still access in the information through the Empire Sprawl number, to be sure, but its far less convenient and harder to evaluate at a glance. Especially for trying to figure out when I will have enough systems to build my next staircase.

Also, at the start of my campaign, I found my pop's starting ethics were highly randomized (including a major xenophobe contingent despite me staring as a Xenophile - they ended up forming one of my first factions and got up to the low 20s% support before gradually diminishing and settling down at 8% (still higher than their attraction value significantly, that said). It feels like a bug, especially as I started out with less Xenophile pops than Xenophobe as a Xenophile nation.

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

We are very interested in hearing your feedback and ideas regarding Federations, and if there was anything you would have wished for us to add.

Could you adjust the Lost Colony origin so that if multiple Lost Colonies of the same species spawn (ie are force-spawned) they have the same parent empire instead of all spawning their own parent empire? Bonus points if it's set up to detect other (force-spawned) non-Lost-Colony empires of the same species and use them. I'd really like to be able to set up a situation with the fragmented successor states of a formerly-galaxy-spanning empire.

 

[GeorgieBest]

@grekulf

For the love of God, please get someone to address the ethics attraction mechanics. They haven't worked for well over a year, and now the 2.6 update broke the mods which fixed the issue...

On another note, some UI improvements to the resettlement screen would be greatly appreciated.

 

[UltimateTobi]

@grekulf

For the love of God, please get someone to address the ethics attraction mechanics. They haven't worked for well over a year, and now the 2.6 update broke the mods which fixed the issue...

According to patch notes they work now, and they still don't work?

 

[Liggi]

It'd be nice if Galactic Community resolutions could apply ethics attraction to all empires in the Galactic Community for particular paths (although this would require each ethic to have a matching path).

 

[Pale Blue]

I also support the call for a spiritualist/organics/ban robots line of resolutions in the galactic council.

I would also like to see the ability of scions to federate or them being parts of a special hegemony with the fallen empire, so you can play together with other empires you force to follow your over lord.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

It's supposed to. That's why the Pop Controls decision comes with a ton of Emigration Push.

A planet with max Emigration sends 95% of its pop growth away to planets that can receive it. The problem is, in the case of Pop Controls, this is bugged. Pop Controls sets pop growth to 0. And 95% of 0 is 0.

Oh wow I didn't know that was a thing. I know you've been talking about this all the time, but I know the "cease drone production" just stops growth and doensn't redirect it. So obviously its a useless and in fact harmful decision. If it did, we'd have to almost not micromanage pops at all. I hope Paradox fixes this bug ASAP.

 

[3Davideo]

That is an improvement that is already planned for the update

We will make it more clear how the votes went, and allow you to use favors

I hope this will also apply to Federation Invite votes too! For a while I was getting spammed with Federation membership applications that I had to pocket veto (let time out) because I knew the rest of my federation was going to vote against it. (This particular situation ultimately resolved itself when I realized you can use favors to get empires to be protectorates. More influence for me!)

On another note, the later resolutions in the Unchained Knowledge tree say they increase researcher output and upkeep, but I don't see either reflected in their tooltips - unless it's rolled into the incredibly vague "Empire" modifier. I assume this also means they're not actually having their intended effects?