Stellaris Game Info

[DrRansom]

One element of the game I'd like to see is a three tier of player power:
1) Exploration phase with low levels of capability
2) Empire phase with moderate capability
3) Superpower / late stage phase with massive, galactic power

In terms of HALO, easiest IP for me to reference:
1 is Humans before the Human Covenant War
2 is Covenant before / during the Human Covenant War
3 is Forerunner before the flood.

I'd really like to see the game sell the massive change and evolution of your species throughout one play through. I think that other 4x games don't convey the change in power between the beginning and end of the game.

What would you rather see, a late game where a Dyson sphere is a prestige project, or a late game where Dyson spheres are military installations to protect you against some nigh unstoppable foe?

As for shipbuilding I hope that Paradox incorporates the economies of scale from HOI4. Fleets should be relatively standardized, to help reduce min-max design tendencies.

 

[brobman22]

One element of the game I'd like to see is a three tier of player power:
1) Exploration phase with low levels of capability
2) Empire phase with moderate capability
3) Superpower / late stage phase with massive, galactic power

In terms of HALO, easiest IP for me to reference:
1 is Humans before the Human Covenant War
2 is Covenant before / during the Human Covenant War
3 is Forerunner before the flood.

I'd really like to see the game sell the massive change and evolution of your species throughout one play through. I think that other 4x games don't convey the change in power between the beginning and end of the game.

What would you rather see, a late game where a Dyson sphere is a prestige project, or a late game where Dyson spheres are military installations to protect you against some nigh unstoppable foe?

As for shipbuilding I hope that Paradox incorporates the economies of scale from HOI4. Fleets should be relatively standardized, to help reduce min-max design tendencies.

that three tier stage is a thing except a huge crisis can occur in the third stage like an ai rebellion or warp monsters.

 

[jdavis86]

I was a big fan of Birth of the Federation back in the day. I remember poring over every preview I could find... and ordering the American version of the game so I wouldn't have to wait a few extra weeks for the UK version to reach Sweden.

Very cool! It is surprisingly playable today, and a fun multiplayer game.

Very excited about Stellaris!

 

[Daltesh]

I hope that Paradox will have a more realistic population modeling. Its irritating seeing earth like planets having populations of 20+ billion consistently, when the earth would be hard pressed to sustain that without importing massive amounts of food from else where. Having a few planets that become super populated is reasonable, just like how some areas on earth are very densely populated, but every planet shouldn't be Macao in planet form, that's just not possible.

I find it a strange assumption to make that in a high-tech society, agricultural output is still tied to arable land. Wouldn't skyscraper sized vat farms of genetically engineered, super yummy and nutritious algae have higher outputs than growing space corn on the planet Nebraska VI?

My point is just that you shouldn't worry too much about high populations; most numbers that I have seen about Earth's carrying capacity make vast assumptions about agricultural technology, usually that it will never advance. It's just when you get to Coruscant levels of population where things really start to get wonky.

 

[Otto of england]

I find it a strange assumption to make that in a high-tech society, agricultural output is still tied to arable land. Wouldn't skyscraper sized vat farms of genetically engineered, super yummy and nutritious algae have higher outputs than growing space corn on the planet Nebraska VI?

My point is just that you shouldn't worry too much about high populations; most numbers that I have seen about Earth's carrying capacity make vast assumptions about agricultural technology, usually that it will never advance. It's just when you get to Coruscant levels of population where things really start to get wonky.

You make a far point, yet even with that technology you outline I find it hard to believe we could feed twice or three times the current population. Since unless you get the problem that unless you go towards the Macao side of the Macao-Greenland scale of population density, you will lose large amounts of your arable land and with tripling the population would mean that the new future technology has to produce 3x the food in somewhere between a half and the current amount of arable land (assuming similar population densities). Though even if we assume a more dense population, you have to keep in mind much of the earths surface is not pleasant to live in, with deserts, mountains and arctic areas never getting dense population as a result. So its very likely that even if the next 14 billion live in a 8x denser then normal configuration we will still have less then half of our current arable land.

So on the assumption that our current land level produces sufficient food for 7 billion people (it doesn't, though I'm not sure if its closer to excess or insufficient) then in this hypothetical 21 billion person earth we would need to produce 6x the food per square kilometer something which I don't think is possible at this point. Significantly less possible then FTL travel at least.

 

[Daltesh]

You make a far point, yet even with that technology you outline I find it hard to believe we could feed twice or three times the current population....

We currently produce an excess of calories for the Earth's population. The issue of starvation is mostly logistical and economic
That said, we also have vast tracts of unutilized land and what land we do utilize is often in highly inefficient ways. We could actually feed multiple times our current population with our current technology, provided we have enough fertilizer.
Ultimately though, and I recommend against representing this in the game since agri-worlds are neat bottlenecks and staples of the 4x genre, you could have a planet absolutely covered in megacities so long as you devote the basement of the occasional building to an algae vat farm. It would also solve some of the massive logistical concerns of needing to import trillions of tons of food from space every day, as an urban world with billions of people but no local farming would need.

 

[Otto of england]

We currently produce an excess of calories for the Earth's population. The issue of starvation is mostly logistical and economic
That said, we also have vast tracts of unutilized land and what land we do utilize is often in highly inefficient ways. We could actually feed multiple times our current population with our current technology, provided we have enough fertilizer.

Interesting, I wasn't aware our food production could be significantly better. Though, you provide a second point, which I can say I know little about, but would we have enough fertilizer to produce this much food?

Also I agree with you it creates more strategy to require agri-worlds and worlds that have negative net food. I also think it would feel more immersive, even if its possible that every earth sized planet could produce enough food for 20+ billion people.

 

[henzington]

Also, then you have the possible of blockading an empires agriworld(s) to starve then production planets which would create unrest/war exhaustion and reduce their population.

 

[Wagonlitz]

Interesting, I wasn't aware our food production could be significantly better. Though, you provide a second point, which I can say I know little about, but would we have enough fertilizer to produce this much food?

Also I agree with you it creates more strategy to require agri-worlds and worlds that have negative net food. I also think it would feel more immersive, even if its possible that every earth sized planet could produce enough food for 20+ billion people.

And the fertilizer indeed is the problem; there is something called peak phosphorus which is expected to hit around 2030.

 

[Daltesh]

Interesting, I wasn't aware our food production could be significantly better. Though, you provide a second point, which I can say I know little about, but would we have enough fertilizer to produce this much food?

Also I agree with you it creates more strategy to require agri-worlds and worlds that have negative net food. I also think it would feel more immersive, even if its possible that every earth sized planet could produce enough food for 20+ billion people.

Thankfully, yes. For the most part, fertilizers are just nitrogen, potassium, and/or phosphorus. All three of these are extremely common in nature and fundamental to organic life.

I think when a culture has faster than light travel, the availability of raw materials becomes a non-factor. It simply becomes a concern of manpower and infrastructure able to extract and transport these materials.

There still is the problem of Mars not being able to retain a thick atmosphere tough.

I recall reading that while Mars can't maintain a thick atmosphere for a long period of time on its own, it would still take tens if not hundreds of thousands of years for an artificially produced atmosphere to be stripped away.

I think terraforming could be done in a relatively short (but still measured in decades) amount of time if you did it with engineered microbes or nanobots that break down soil to release oxygen and nitrogen, but this would give plenty of room for those end game events to see your planets suddenly turn massive puddles of grey goo.

 

[Otto of england]

I think when a culture has faster than light travel, the availability of raw materials becomes a non-factor. It simply becomes a concern of manpower and infrastructure able to extract and transport these materials.

Yea, by this point energy is the biggest concern.

 

[Sunbro BigBoss]

I think when a culture has faster than light travel, the availability of raw materials becomes a non-factor. It simply becomes a concern of manpower and infrastructure able to extract and transport these materials.

I'm not sure about that. Population keeps growing, and so does the demand for everything; given enough time and population even the resources of an entire galaxy could start to look scarce.

 

[Rip Off Productions]

some of my thoughts on the 3 FTL styles:
We know you pick one at the start of the game, and I assume that you wouldn't be able to get any of the others until after First Contact with a species that uses one of the others.

Example of how I think it would work: let's say you pick the Wormhole/stargate style FTL, latter you meet a Warp using species, at this point you either have a war or diplomatic relations, either can result in you acquiring a tech they have that you don't and vice versa, though I'd imagine that the highest end techs, especially military ones, are less likely to be given out in diplomatic relations. In fact I could see "acquire/sabotage [technology name here] research" as a CB in the game.
This can include the other 2 methods of FTL travel, but if you get this from reverse engineering there is a higher risk that you might cause one of the Event Horizon style events related to that travel method.
Building ships with your nonstandard FTL method is more expensive, and putting two or all three onto one ship? Massively expensive, perhaps even impossibly so for anyone who isn't the head of a Federation that has at least one member who started with each.

 

[Firestormxxx]

My thoughts for terraforming and uninhabitable planets:
A few posts before someone mentioned that we hopefully could share our uninhabitable planets with another species for their planets they cant use, but we could.
So if each species has 2 possible inhabitable planets, first with perfect conditions and the second with medium conditions, the second one could be made to a perfect with terraforming.
All other planets could be shared within our federation and strengthens the cohesion, trade, acceptance for other species and so on....
Why would you terraform a hot desert planet if you are an underwater species? Insted you could benefit if you trade this planet to youre ally for a water/semi-water planet they cant use
So we dont really need a massive powerfull terraforming, only a fast and easy one, to terraform the medium condition planets.

 

[Thure]

Isn't vertical farming a solution for the population problem? Or at least something in this direction.

 

[Zoob]

Yeah, beacause CK2 and EU4 battles lasts for years?

Are you asking me?

 

[Daltesh]

I'm not sure about that. Population keeps growing, and so does the demand for everything; given enough time and population even the resources of an entire galaxy could start to look scarce.

I do concede that the universe likely has finite resources, but the sort of population required to exploit them would be best described using scientific notation, and the amount of time it would take to fully exploit it would risk nudging up against the heat death of the universe.
But for the first couple of trillion years it should be fine, provided FTL isn't limited to a single galaxy.

But back on the topic of rampant conjecture for Stellaris, I'm sort of hoping that space battles are brutally fast and devastating, but ground combat is horribly slow and doubly devastating.

 

[Rhaegar1]

I really don't think that a population of 20 billion should be out of the ordinary for earth-like planets. Even in relatively densily populated area's of the world like eastern Europe (Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine) the amount of unused, fertile land is staggering, and then we are not even talking about the (lack of) productivity per used acre of land. For example, I know for a fact that the average amount of potatoes produced by an acre of land in Bulgaria is 7 times less then it is in Holland, 7 times!!! There is so much land in the world that if being used with the same efficiency as farmers in Holland do would deliver enough food for 100 billion people.

Fertilizer can easily be made by having good recycling and an abundence of energy.

Limited amounts of (rare earth) metals would be a bigger problem but with astroid mining that could be solved relatively easily so perhaps only energy is a bottleneck. But even with todays technology (nuclear power) we could easily power a population twice as large as we have today. With near future technologies like thorium fuelled nuclear fission or nuclear fusion we can easily power the energy needs of tens of billions of people for ten thousends of years. Nothing that would seem to out of the ordinary in a scify setting.

 

[Darkath]

With near future technologies like thorium fuelled nuclear fission or nuclear fusion we can easily power the energy needs of tens of billions of people for ten thousends of years. Nothing that would seem to out of the ordinary in a scify setting.

Also in the future you could have all your nuclear/fusion plants in orbit, mitigating the risk of contamination on earth in case of failure.

(but a solar panel ring around earth would be the coolest thing)

 

[BrokenSky]

Would still take thousands of years.

You're assuming we're using Earth Human tech. I'm using Gaopos Flargian tech, where they learned to change the environment before they learned about electricity.

Limited amounts of (rare earth) metals would be a bigger problem but with astroid mining that could be solved relatively easily so perhaps only energy is a bottleneck. But even with todays technology (nuclear power) we could easily power a population twice as large as we have today. With near future technologies like thorium fuelled nuclear fission or nuclear fusion we can easily power the energy needs of tens of billions of people for ten thousends of years. Nothing that would seem to out of the ordinary in a scify setting.

If we used Nuclear Power to supply that big a population we'd run out of fuel in less than a century.

I'm not sure about that. Population keeps growing, and so does the demand for everything; given enough time and population even the resources of an entire galaxy could start to look scarce.

Not if you have large regions you can mine but can't live. E.g. Asteroids, Stars, Venus etc.