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Stellaris Dev Diary #177 - Edict Rework

Greetings!

Today we’ll touch upon a subject dear to the hearts of many galactic rulers - namely Edicts!

Background
Edicts are meant to be a way for your empire to focus on certain issues without necessarily taking a permanent stance on them. More permanent stances on issues would be covered by Policies.

Although we felt that Edicts do fit this role pretty well, there were a couple of issues with the system that we think could be improved. The fact that Edicts would always time out felt like a little bit of unnecessary micromanagement at times, and didn’t really emphasize the feeling of “I am choosing to focus on these 2 things right now”. We felt that it would fit better if Edicts had a greater emphasis on making choices that you can go back and change, rather than being things you constantly go in and refresh.

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An old friend with a slight makeover. Some Edicts are now toggled on/off instead of being on a timer.

Edict Capacity
Enter Edict Capacity – a new mechanic that puts a soft limit on how many Edicts of a certain type that you can have active at once. Similar to Starbase Capacity, your empire will suffer penalties if you exceed it, and the penalty in this case being Empire Sprawl. For every toggled and active Edict above the Edict Capacity, your Empire Sprawl will be increased by +25%.

By default, an empire will start with an Edict Capacity of 2, and can be modified by things like Authority, Civics and Ascension Perks. These values are very prone to being changed as more balance feedback comes in.

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Dictatorial and Imperial Authority now increases Edict Capacity by +1.

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The God-Emperor knows best.

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You can now vigorously enact more Edicts.

Not all Edicts will use Edict Capacity, but rather only the ones that last until cancelled will. Edicts that can be toggled will have an Activation Cost and a Deactivation Cost, which is usually Influence. This means that you are paying the Influence when you are making changes, rather than paying to upkeep the Edicts you want.

Edicts that last until cancelled will be marked with a different icon from the edicts (and campaigns) that expire once their duration runs out.

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An example of two different Edicts. Red: toggled - lasts until cancelled and uses Edict Capacity. Blue: temporary - lasts for 10 years and does not use Edict Capacity.

Edicts
Some of the Edicts have changed and we have added a couple of new ones, to better fit with the Edict Capacity. Let’s take a look at a few of them:

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Whenever you need to stimulate your economy, subsidies can be the way to go. There are Farming, Mining, Energy and Industrial subsidies.

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Neighbors suddenly turned hostile? Need to secure your borders? Pass this Edict to refocus your efforts!

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Has the galaxy become more hostile? Do you need to build a powerful fleet to project your power? Focus on Fleet Supremacy for a more powerful and imposing fleet.

Pop Growth is problematic, so we have made some changes in the upcoming patch that will reduce Pop Growth from different sources across the board (more on that later). Food Policies are no more, and the popular Nutritional Plenitude is now a toggled Edict instead.

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No longer a food policy (they don’t exist anymore). There are different versions for Hive Minds and Rogue Servitors.

Resource Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions
The model for the new Edict Capacity doesn’t fit very well for all types of Edicts, which is why the rare resource Edicts, Campaigns and Unity Ambitions remain unchanged and keep working like you are used to. This is also better for modding purposes, so that modders have the opportunity to use Edicts however they see best.

Finishing thoughts
Overall we feel like the new system better allows us to structure how the players get the tools they need to focus their empires for certain tasks. As we make more additions to the game in the future, this new system will also allow us to give the players more tools to address certain issues.

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That is all for this week! We will be back again next week with another dev diary, this time about some federation-related content!
 
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Sooo, what do genocidal empires spend their influence on now? They can't spend influence on claims, expansion only exists in the early part of the game, and they can't spend it on diplomatic interactions either.
Megastructures!

That add turning edicts on and off.
 
Crazy Idea

According to the Stellaris Wiki:
Influence represents the political power and authority of the central government and is used to exert authority over the empire and others.

Your influence is supposedly used to push your government into doing what you want and get empires to listen.

Should influence costs therefore increase proportional to the amount of resistance you have from the government.

For instance if I want to enact Fleet Supremacy (which for purposes of this example would be opposed by Pacifists and supported by militarists) would it not be better if the enact cost was multiplied by 1 + (balance adjustment x (% of pacifist pops - % of militarist pops)). Obviously cancelling would be opposed by the militarists, but supported by the pacifists.

This could be further modified by authority where democracies face larger cost swings because the people can really get behind you or dig in and oppose it, while oligarchies are affected less and despotic and imperial are affected the least.

If you reall want to increase empire sprawl due to the bureaucratic work of these edicts, they’d be better implemented at a flat 5 or 10% per edict.
 
That is all for this week! We will be back again next week with another dev diary, this time about some federation-related content!
So is there a reason that this post isn't pinned?

Should influence costs therefore increase proportional to the amount of resistance you have from the government.
That's a really good idea! And it helps make factions more important to pay attention to as well, especially if you add more unique edicts.
 
I like the fact I now won't have to constantly refresh all my edicts every 10+ however-many-repeatable-techs-I-now-have years, and a soft cap seems a reasonable price to pay for that.

Will we have any more diplomatic edicts? Perhaps some edicts for controlling pop ethics? (Since your 'fixes' to pop ethics, its actually become a huge pain to try give a faction the boot in my Fanatic Authoritarian empire.) Will certain edicts be able to influence what other empires think of you in any way? It'd make sense that an empire that decides to enact Securing the Border and Fleet Supremecy should cause some pacifists (oh silly pacifists) to become concerned.
 
not sure if it has already been suggested:
But right now, whenever a edict times out, a message pops up
Would it be an option, to add a "Reactivate" button to that masage?
It's just tedious to go to the edict screen every time to to that manuelly...
 
While nice to see, I'm hoping this is apart of a large improvement and expansion on government ethics, civics, and authority. Democracies already feel a bit lackluster mechanically, partially because of how hit or miss (or even bugged) their mandate mechanics are, compared to the actual mechanical boon of an agenda.
 
I'm hoping any such change is more than just some general nerf. I thought the problem with pop growth wasn't that it was too fast, but that there was only one good way to obtain it: aggressive expansion and acquiring as many colonies as quickly as possible.

Well, fixing that would be easy - just make pop growth realistic, which means it should scale with number of pops. Dunno why when you create a new colony it starts giving you the same pop growth as colony with billions of people already living there. It's oversimplification that's creating this "rush new colony" tactic. 10B people should more or less grow at the same speed either when gathered on 1 world or when spread on across 100 worlds (as long as that 1 world have enough capacity/resources to maintain such population of course). Late-game techs such as cloning facilities could start giving constant modifiers to growth, instead of multiplier modifiers - which could additionally start-boost growth on new planets. Until that moment (or enough critical mass gathered on new worlds), new colonies growth should be mainly migration-based.

I hope one of the future DLCs will introduce such changes to the game. But this is huge change, as the core pop-mechanics are based upon the current system, e.g. building capacities on new colonies. Therefore I'm tad not expecting anyone to go there in the end, but I'm wondering if this was considered in the design of Stellaris at some point.
 
Still feel a little bit disappointing that resource edicts, campaigns and unity ambitions are on the old system. It would have been nice with a coherent remake of the entire system, instead of having in even more a little bit all over the place. Looks good what have been done though.
 
While nice to see, I'm hoping this is apart of a large improvement and expansion on government ethics, civics, and authority. Democracies already feel a bit lackluster mechanically, partially because of how hit or miss (or even bugged) their mandate mechanics are, compared to the actual mechanical boon of an agenda.

wait, what

agendas arent mechanics, they are modifiers you do not interact with, ever... unlike mandates... THOSE are mechanics...

what you are saying is literally the opposite of how the game works right now...
 
Not sure if its been mentioned already, but while I like the idea of a soft edict cap, I don't get why strategic resource edicts, ambitions and campaigns aren't being changed as they were the biggest offenders of the take every edict strategy. The basic edicts (capacity overload, production targets, etc) were the ones you might actually avoid because influence is the hardest resource to amass in the game.
 
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Not sure if its been mentioned already, but while I like the idea of a soft edict cap, I don't get why strategic resource edicts, ambitions and campaigns aren't being changed as they were the biggest offenders of the take every edict strategy. The basic edicts (capacity overload, production targets, etc) were the ones you might actually avoid because influence is the hardest resource to amass in the game.
Ah, but here's what you're missing

The edicts are not on auto-refresh.

They're a "pay once, then forget" option. You have to pay to turn it off, or rather, "pay twice" to switch to a new edict.

And I actually disagree with people saying that everyone will always go with nurtional plentitude. Capacity overload and Production Targets are both very strong as permanent +20% production bonuses. Having more pops is better, but having +20% more energy production is sort of like having +20% technicians, which is kind of like free pops by itself.
 
While nice to see, I'm hoping this is apart of a large improvement and expansion on government ethics, civics, and authority. Democracies already feel a bit lackluster mechanically, partially because of how hit or miss (or even bugged) their mandate mechanics are, compared to the actual mechanical boon of an agenda.

I’m actually hoping for a small content update only (strictly localisation, art, txt script files and music). Anything new features requiring changes to the .exe or other core coding it may lean on needs to be put on hold until existing features, OOSs, CTDs and other acronyms are fixed. By all means add new ships, models, events etc. but if you try to add new features which require deeper code access on top of the existing issues then we’re only going to go backwards. I predict going backwards.

Edit: and UI updates are ok too!
 
Ah, but here's what you're missing

The edicts are not on auto-refresh.

They're a "pay once, then forget" option. You have to pay to turn it off, or rather, "pay twice" to switch to a new edict.

And I actually disagree with people saying that everyone will always go with nurtional plentitude. Capacity overload and Production Targets are both very strong as permanent +20% production bonuses. Having more pops is better, but having +20% more energy production is sort of like having +20% technicians, which is kind of like free pops by itself.

No, what I'm saying is that currently, by the time the mid-late game rolls around, the influence edicts are the only ones you have to consider taking or not. This has nothing to do with being pay upfront or every X years. However, all ambitions and campaigns may as well be run all the time because you have the resources to do so. These are the decisions that need to be restricted under the cap. As it stands, when the new patch comes out, I'm hardly going to change my strategies. I'll run 2-4 edicts (since that is all I run anyway) and then run every ambition and campaign in the game. By the time crisis date rolls around, I'll also run every strategic resource edict.
 
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Unless...and try really hard to follow along with this one...they change the spiritualist bonus to more edict capacity. You know, because they might just change bonuses like that when they overhaul the entire system.
I hope so!

But 'edict capacity' seems to be replacing duration increase so far, not cost reduction. One of the two civics still has the cost reduction.

No, what I'm saying is that currently, by the time the mid-late game rolls around, the influence edicts are the only ones you have to consider taking or not. This has nothing to do with being pay upfront or every X years. However, all ambitions and campaigns may as well be run all the time because you have the resources to do so. These are the decisions that need to be restricted under the cap. As it stands, when the new patch comes out, I'm hardly going to change my strategies. I'll run 2-4 edicts (since that is all I run anyway) and then run every ambition and campaign in the game. By the time crisis date rolls around, I'll also run every strategic resource edict.

I think that's more a general problem with how explosive late game resource production is. Like its absurd.
 
This has probably come up earlier in the thread, but wouldn't it be preferable to have a monthly influence cost per edict, for however long it's active, rather than a one-time influence cost whenever you change it, if the goal is to be something you want players to change instead of mashing the button every 10 years? If I am paying influence every time I want to change an edict, I probably will be super-reluctant to change them situationally, whereas I might switch as needed if the monthly cost is the same (as long as I run the same number of edicts).
 
@grekulf I know you said you weren't going to be changing existing edicts for rare resources (nanites, living metal, dark matter, etc.), but are you considering adding additional ones? While the rare strategic resources are useful for construction purposes and can be sold, they don't have enough interesting features to justify their rarity. Dark matter, for example, doesn't even have an edict.

Some ideas below (all would last a certain number of years like current edicts do):
--Edict requiring dark matter that cuts FTL/jump cooldowns in half
--Edict requiring dark matter that immunizes your ships from the effects of black holes (could allow for some interesting tactics
--Edict requiring zro that increases the HP of psionic shields by 25%
--Edict requiring zro that increases evasion of all your ships by 10%
--Edict requiring living metal that gives your ships regen