Stellaris has become stale since the midgame and endgames are just research lab building simulators and nothing is done about it.

[Pancakelord]

Stellaris is not a game which effectively supports an outcome where you get "slapped down" and continue the game, there's only one real axis of progress for the player, which is getting ever more swole.

I would not agree with this, but then I do tend to play on > 1x planets, where such a playstyle is viable. Given sufficient time (less time on 3.2.2 I'm happy to see) AIs can bounce back from having some of their worlds stolen. Though, if you're playing with fewer colonies, then yes you get eaten and die fast. The way I see it, there are three ways to look at it,

1. either bring a crisis forward, so that whilst the player is still stronger than the AI in 2240 (by say 3x), they're roughly parity, or a bit weaker, vs the khan. I.e. shift from black to red below. It may mean the AI cant help me, but at leastI'll get a decent fight out of the crisis - neither a steamroll nor a suicide war.
   • 
2. hold back player expansion to prevent snowballing (either through gamey softcaps [bad], or through mechanics - like rebellions and so on forcing you to divert resources)
   • (Radically depressing the blue bar above) - internal politics as @hart30 points out will likely do this.
     • Though I have my doubts that PDX will include situations in vanilla that really impact my Alloy or Research printers in a way that will move the needle on player FP.
3. buff AIs [inflating the green bar above] (which is already done via difficulty* and general AI work) + try and improve their allocative efficiency (which to my knowledge is not done)
   • AIs dont pick techs. Even if you give them a cheat to match player science output exactly, they would still fall behind the player. Because the player plans, as you said, whilst the AI takes a random(ish) walk. They might have my output but I'll pick battleships whilst they're working on extra corvette hull plating or something like that.
     • Adding a special event to occasionally "leak" tech choices (but not progress) and a universal AI weight to encourage them to pick tech cards that have been leaked, would indirectly encourage AIs to chase whatever techs an ahead-player has been taking. Narrowing the gap a bit. Buffing research pacts would work towards this too. AIs tend to use those a lot, if a ton of them are stacking pacts that might amount to something.
   • * AI difficulty settings don't include tech multipliers though. A small (20-40%) tech income buff, whilst unpalatable to some vs having a "fair" AI, would probably narrow the gap a good deal.

And these 3 options arent exclusive by any means. There is no reason why all 3 cant be factored in to balancing; letting crises rise up earlier, letting AIs get dodgy benefits with techs and giving the player more stuff to deal with.

 

[GloatingSwine]

And these 3 options arent exclusive by any means. There is no reason why all 3 cant be factored in to balancing; letting crises rise up earlier, letting AIs get dodgy benefits with techs and giving the player more stuff to deal with.

Letting the crises arise earlier just exacerbates the problem though.

The crises are fixed metrics by which the player's empire is judged which are completely unmoored from the power of the rest of the galaxy. As long as that remains true, the AI becomes irrelevant as soon as there is a risk of one of them happening imminently.

From about 10 years before the midgame date the power of AI empires is irrelevant to the player, the player is now judging their progress against what is going to be required to deal with the Khan and/or Grey Tempest.

All moving the crises forward does is incentivise the player to outscale the AI even earlier and even harder. Making the rest of the game except for these three specific events even more uninteresting because the player can't meaningfully interact in a challenging manner with any of the other content, if they choose to squash an AI that AI can do nothing but accept its fate, and the doing of it will be so bereft of thought and engagement that the main challenge is dealing with the tedium of transport ships, and the player will be so powerful that no combination of AI will ever dare declare war on them.


The power level of the crisis events needs to be yoked to the power level of the galaxy such that they can be fought by AI factions, and the power level available to the player needs to be reined in considerably so that they simply cannot outscale the AI anywhere near as hard as they currently can.

 

[Ludaire]

I can get deep into repeatable techs by 2350 with only two or three half-built tech worlds and minimal research buffs. If anything, the end game is spamming metallurgists where the goal is "How high can I get my alloy surplus while my reserves sit at full?"

 

[Cry_Havok]

You also have to mod the AI to something that can actually scale up to mid-game/end-game on a reasonable schedule, such as Starnet.

There's a deeper problem though, which is that Stellaris is inherently a very snowbally game because of how tech works. Big blobs don't just have more pops, hey get *more power per pop* and there's just no way for smaller empires to compete long-term. So in single player, unless the game is very carefully calibrated to your skill level (and even then, luck will get in the way), either you get outpaced, or you outpace the AI, and eventually you can pretty much do whatever you want diplomatically. You can change the pace of this progression by adjusting the tech costs, but you can't really change the underlying dynamics.

Another factor in single player is the lack of teaming up against stronger empires (MP is obviously different as player diplomacy is not limited by game mechanics) and the diplomatic stagnation encouraged by federations (which "level up" based almost entirely on how long they have existed, nothing to do with what the federation actually accomplishes). I mean yes, you can provoke a showdown with the rest of the galaxy with Become the Crisis or whatever. But the boring EU4-style mid-game blob, not genocidal or anything, just steadily vassalizing/annexing across the map (or not so gradually if you unlock Colossus CB) simply isn't going to get this response and will more than likely be allowed to continue taking on enemies one federation at a time. Then when you have enough of the galaxy to outvote everyone else, you just declare yourself Galactic Emperor and the game is over, because the chance of rebellion against the Imperium is effectively nil.

Now, granted, this doesn't stop prescripted enemies being a threat. But because their power level is set at game start, they are at the mercy of the playable empire power curve, and timing becomes absolutely everything: a fleet that would be overwhelming in 2300 will be a joke by 2350, and so on. It's also not really possible for the player to know this before they start the game, unless they've played through several games before (and even then, there are so many variables depending on build, who your starting neighbours are, balance changes due to a new patch, and so on). So hitting that sweet spot of challenging but not impossible is actually quite hard.

One of the big problems with snowballing is how easy conquest is, which is part of the problem of lack of internal politics or any meaningful check on expansion

 

[Atreides]

One of the big problems with snowballing is how easy conquest is, which is part of the problem of lack of internal politics or any meaningful check on expansion

One of the big problems with snowballing is how easy conquest is, which is part of the problem of lack of internal politics or any meaningful check on expansion

I think the ease of assimilating said conquests is the real culprit. Trying to rule a dozen recently conquered dozen is far to easy/profitable under the current system.

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

I think the ease of assimilating said conquests is the real culprit. Trying to rule a dozen recently conquered dozen is far to easy/profitable under the current system.

I’ve always said the ‘recently conquered’ modify should be in in three stages.

Phase 1: Recently Conquered / Insurgency (10 years).

Much bigger happiness and productivity malus so you’re needing to mobilise troops, increase crime prevention and effectively have a troublesome planet to maintain. Much more likely to face revolt as those conquer try to retake the planet.

Phase 2: Restructuring / Regime Change (20 years)

Phase two lessens the malus, but is still significant. At this stage rebellions should be less common / likely but productivity should still be low as society restructures and adapts to the new normal. Revolts can still happen if you don’t keep an eye on things but are less likely to occur.

Phase 3: Acceptance (20 years)

Kind of where conquering is now. It won’t be your most productive planet, but almost a new generation has been brought up under the new occupied rule and so the status quo is established. You may need to throw some luxury goods here and there to keep disgruntled pops happy but overall it’s as good as yours.

Of course if an empire retakes their planet in the first 30 year period, there should be some liberation bonus so that the former owners can bounce back from their earlier defeat.

 

[ArmChairAttila]

Complaints like these are valid... for the default game settings. But the problem stops there. It's purely a matter of changing the game settings, and you'll get a really well-balanced game that never gets stale. The developers are really undermining and underselling their own game by not changing the defaults. It's all it takes, really.

Set the endgame start date to 2325 and the victory year to 2400, turn up the difficulty, AI aggressiveness and Crisis strength, and voila, you get a much tighter paced game where big events happen one after another and there's little to no downtime.

I second this, default settings create a stale turtle/tech experience. Try max hyperlanes with aggressive AI and a earlier mid/end game. Your mid and end game won't be stale! Good luck trying to spam researchers while neglecting alloys

 

[Ixal]

Wait for the internal politics update, hinted in the last dev diary. There should still plenty of events and sitiations fire way past the midgame in ur own empire. Probably even more the bigger ur empire gets. I a pretty sure this will keep the game interesting in a long term perspective once this patch comes out. I would guess sometime in mid to end of 2022.

Don't expect too much from it.
Even with a full DLC internal politics will change nothing on the general playstyle of mindless mappainting. They couldn't (and probably didn't want to) do it in EU4, why do you think internal politics will be more influential in Stellaris which is even more of a map painter?

 

[Ferrus Animus]

Don't expect too much from it.
Even with a full DLC internal politics will change nothing on the general playstyle of mindless mappainting. They couldn't (and probably didn't want to) do it in EU4, why do you think internal politics will be more influential in Stellaris which is even more of a map painter?

I agree.
Look at Federations and Nemesis. Two diplomacy DLCs that barely changed diplomatic options.

 

[Atreides]

I’ve always said the ‘recently conquered’ modify should be in in three stages.

Phase 1: Recently Conquered / Insurgency (10 years).

Much bigger happiness and productivity malus so you’re needing to mobilise troops, increase crime prevention and effectively have a troublesome planet to maintain. Much more likely to face revolt as those conquer try to retake the planet.

Phase 2: Restructuring / Regime Change (20 years)

Phase two lessens the malus, but is still significant. At this stage rebellions should be less common / likely but productivity should still be low as society restructures and adapts to the new normal. Revolts can still happen if you don’t keep an eye on things but are less likely to occur.

Phase 3: Acceptance (20 years)

Kind of where conquering is now. It won’t be your most productive planet, but almost a new generation has been brought up under the new occupied rule and so the status quo is established. You may need to throw some luxury goods here and there to keep disgruntled pops happy but overall it’s as good as yours.

Of course if an empire retakes their planet in the first 30 year period, there should be some liberation bonus so that the former owners can bounce back from their earlier defeat.

I’ve always said the ‘recently conquered’ modify should be in in three stages.

Phase 1: Recently Conquered / Insurgency (10 years).

Much bigger happiness and productivity malus so you’re needing to mobilise troops, increase crime prevention and effectively have a troublesome planet to maintain. Much more likely to face revolt as those conquer try to retake the planet.

Phase 2: Restructuring / Regime Change (20 years)

Phase two lessens the malus, but is still significant. At this stage rebellions should be less common / likely but productivity should still be low as society restructures and adapts to the new normal. Revolts can still happen if you don’t keep an eye on things but are less likely to occur.

Phase 3: Acceptance (20 years)

Kind of where conquering is now. It won’t be your most productive planet, but almost a new generation has been brought up under the new occupied rule and so the status quo is established. You may need to throw some luxury goods here and there to keep disgruntled pops happy but overall it’s as good as yours.

Of course if an empire retakes their planet in the first 30 year period, there should be some liberation bonus so that the former owners can bounce back from their earlier defeat.

Definitely better than the current system - although I would do something like 20/30/50 as the years involved.

 

[DaRealJaymc1130]

Be not afraid.
The Shattered Ring Origin has been nerfed into the ground. The problem is almost solved.

That's ridiculous, it was already massively overrated and the nerfs to it have managed to bring it into line with the other A tier Empire archetype options. Shattered Ring is still a very strong competitive origin, its just not universally better than any other option for any type of empire archetype any more.

 

[Incompetent]

I think the ease of assimilating said conquests is the real culprit. Trying to rule a dozen recently conquered dozen is far to easy/profitable under the current system.

This is true, but you also have to take into account raiding or force-vassalize+integrate as alternative ways to acquire those pops that are by force but not technically by conquest.

If the penalties for newly-acquired pops are mostly happiness-based, then a big problem is that you can often simply enslave recently-conquered pops, and then you don't need to keep them happy as long as you sprinkle in a few citizen ruler pops. Just going around enslaving everyone is way too easy. Slavery used to be a much smaller part of the game when it was Worker jobs only, but now that slaves can make alloys and science too, it's become a quick fix for any sort of political issues. Then there is synth assimilation, which not only erases species distinctions, it also basically resets pop ethics (with most of them ending up in the Materialist faction, who are basically happy as long as you're not behind on tech, which you won't be if you're a fully synth-ascended snowballing blob).

Another problem is that while additive penalties like Stellar Culture Shock or the martial law penalty sting early on, later you can just tank them, because you're getting so many bonuses from other things. If penalties are really supposed to make these conquests unprofitable for a while, as opposed to just being slightly less profitable, they need to be scaled differently.

 

[Ixal]

I think the ease of assimilating said conquests is the real culprit. Trying to rule a dozen recently conquered dozen is far to easy/profitable under the current system.

True, but that won't change.
Stellaris is centered around mass conquest and map painting. There is literally nothing else to do. So PDX won't make the outcome of conquest more challenging. Especially as you conquer so much any problems will just be annoying instead of challenging.

 

[gamerk2]

The power level of the crisis events needs to be yoked to the power level of the galaxy such that they can be fought by AI factions, and the power level available to the player needs to be reined in considerably so that they simply cannot outscale the AI anywhere near as hard as they currently can.

I've been arguing this point for years now. Crisis' should spawned based on Galaxy Fleet Power, not a fixed year, then apply any Crisis difficulty buffs. This allows the strength and timing of the Crisis spawn to be controlled in a manner that allows it to be challenging without devolving into waiting for it to spawn.

I also agree that Stellaris is much to easy for one or two Empires to outscore everyone else, without a real mechanism to do anything about it (especially in SP). This could use some fine tuning; maybe making things like upgraded research buildings providing fewer jobs.

 

[gamerk2]

The AI SHOULD be wrecked by all of those. They are "bosses" for the player(s) to defeat. You aren't supposed to be able to stick your head in the sand and let the AI beat the game for you.

If the AI is ever competitive against crises, that only means you have to turn up the crisis slider more.

I disagree; to me, this highlights how the AI simply gets comically outscaled to the point they stop being even a remote challenge. If not playing a warlike Empire, Strllaris devolvs into a waiting game.

I'm not saying the AI should be able to beat the crisis by itself, but it should at least be able to beat one Crisis fleet itself.

 

[arosenberger14]

Definitely better than the current system - although I would do something like 20/30/50 as the years involved.

That and contested planetary invasions should be much more an apocalyptic event that outright kills a lot of pops to reduce the efficiency of conquest.

True, but that won't change.
Stellaris is centered around mass conquest and map painting. There is literally nothing else to do. So PDX won't make the outcome of conquest more challenging. Especially as you conquer so much any problems will just be annoying instead of challenging.

One big root problem here is that the Stellaris economy is always on a total war footing. The game pushes you to build just enough to support your pops needs while you go ham on alloys and research. The civilian economy is represented by consumer goods (useless to have a surplus of), trade value (pretty useless), and luxuries, all of which take up proportionally much less of your economy than you'd expect from a post-industrial space age ciivilization. Plus there's no real option to mobilize your economy for total war aside from the clunky law changes. The economy is tactically complex with all its building and resource chains and laws, but strategically very simple: maximize alloys and research; maintain slight surplus of everything else. The "grand" strategy is even simpler: maximize pops.

 

[Tacticus101]

This isnt just a Stellaris problem to be fair, snowballing is an issue in most 4X games because the AI just cant keep up with the player in the long term. At a certain point it just becomes a mop up. Stellaris in many ways does better than other games because at least there is some kind of Mid-Late game threat in the Crisis and there is a form of scaling difficulty.

 

[methegrate]

This is true, but you also have to take into account raiding or force-vassalize+integrate as alternative ways to acquire those pops that are by force but not technically by conquest.

If the penalties for newly-acquired pops are mostly happiness-based, then a big problem is that you can often simply enslave recently-conquered pops, and then you don't need to keep them happy as long as you sprinkle in a few citizen ruler pops. Just going around enslaving everyone is way too easy. Slavery used to be a much smaller part of the game when it was Worker jobs only, but now that slaves can make alloys and science too, it's become a quick fix for any sort of political issues. Then there is synth assimilation, which not only erases species distinctions, it also basically resets pop ethics (with most of them ending up in the Materialist faction, who are basically happy as long as you're not behind on tech, which you won't be if you're a fully synth-ascended snowballing blob).

Another problem is that while additive penalties like Stellar Culture Shock or the martial law penalty sting early on, later you can just tank them, because you're getting so many bonuses from other things. If penalties are really supposed to make these conquests unprofitable for a while, as opposed to just being slightly less profitable, they need to be scaled differently.

Agreed. I would also suggest that it's really two problems:

- Even after all the modifiers, it's still almost always profitable to conquer a planet than to leave it alone. Even if it's a small profit, you virtually always end up net-positive.

- Regardless of your own profits, it's almost always worth taking a planet away from another empire. Even in the rare situation where I lost income on a planet, the enemy empire has lost more than me.

Idk... One idea would be to tweak the modifiers around pop or job upkeep. You could do something like:

- Sabotage Modifier: If stability is low enough, job upkeep is set at 1.2x the job's output. So like that Metallurgist will produce 3 Alloys, but have an upkeep of 3.6 Alloys and 6 Minerals. (Or whatever number works better.) That way by definition the planet can never be profitable.

- Growing Discontent: If happiness is low enough, a pop's individual upkeep is set at 1.x times the last month's upkeep. That way, it's not a stable system. An unhappy populace will continue to need more resources to manage. You can try to outproduce that, but unless you solve the happiness problem you'll be chasing your own tail.

Of course, this doesn't deal with the problem that a planet is still probably worth taking just to deny it to your enemy, but it might at least add some real costs to that action.

 

[Pancakelord]

Of course, this doesn't deal with the problem that a planet is still probably worth taking just to deny it to your enemy, but it might at least add some real costs to that action.

Adding some events to buff resource income (relative to what was lost) for 5-10 years might help [e.g. "industrial sector solidarity/post-war boom"].

Likewise, converting the number of pops lost through war (vs total pre-war pop) via bombing, theft or stolen planets, into some sort of growth modifier might help the other side bounce back (or deathspiral as they breed like nuts after you seize a ringworld lol). This one would probably make pop-theft exceedingly good, though.

Neither really make up for a lost world, but if their benefits are high enough, decaying over 10-20 yrs, it should let the other side make a stronger comeback in the early-midgame.

Similarly, (depending on how the unity rework manifests itself) adding things like unity - or god forbid influence - upkeep per "recently conquered" pop (x per free/non-purging pop NOT of your governing ethos*, 0.5x per slave, 0 if straight in the purge bucket) - to emulate "social integration"- would make taking a world far more costly.

* Taking a pop of your governing ethos (e.g. a militarist when youre fan mil) still applies a 'recently conquered' modifier reducing happiness [it should probably increase crime and reduce output too tbh], but waives the unity/influence upkeep.

 

[methegrate]

My other thought is that part of the problem is how much Stellaris uses pop up events and modifiers in place of gameplay.

We don't need more content for the middle and late game. Stellaris comes with tons of stuff in the box. I would argue that's exactly the problem. I can build a lot of things that don't mean anything (by the time you can build megastructures, you long ago maxed out on resources) and tick a lot of boxes with little impact (policies and factions for sure). But because the actual gameplay mechanics in the middle game are relatively weak, not much connects all of that content together.

I feel like it's one of those situations where the solution is both more simple and much harder than people keep making it seem. It's not about figuring out what more could go in the game. Instead, I feel like they need to figure out a clear goal for the players in the middle and late game. And they need to figure out a few, ideally simple, rules for how to pursue that goal that would lead to emergent, interesting gameplay.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's an easy task at all. It's just, that's what the middle game is missing. We don't need more content. We need stronger gameplay to tie that content together, so that the things you can discover, encounter and build have meaning.