Stellaris is no longer a space strategy game

[MichaelJanuary]

From the start, I found one or two things not quite immersive, but let it slide. Just subjective opinion of how space strategy games should work. No big deal. Other things were, and some still are, really great. (Exploration, anomalies, archeology).

But over the years, some of the things I found non immersive has grown to be huge volcano sized pimples on the face of Stellaris for me.

Specifically, in the areas of economy, population, logistics, Stellaris makes no effort to model the fact that planets are light years apart. It makes no difference whatsoever where in your empire a planet is. This doesnt affect population, resources, logistics, manufacturing. With the global resource model all planets might as well just be one giant planet that loses or gains a few slots due to colonisation or conflict.

Likewise, the distinction between alien species, technology, goals, objectives are merely cosmetic. A minor modifier here and there that flattens out to nothing in the end anyway. The global population growth models (new and old) make no immersive sense. Planets dont grow pops. Pops should grow pops. Migration is not just a 'growth modifier' completely independent from logistics. Pops should not magically appear and re appear on planets light years apart, and sometimes swap species in the process.

The rest (diplomacy, expansion, warfare, etc) might as well taken place on a flat land mass. Except for the graphics (starmap and lasers), it's got nothing to do with space.


EDIT: Expanded on my reasoning here.

 

[Borgratz]

Could you define what you think a strategy game is?

Nothing you mentioned sounds like a required core component of a strategy game to me.

 

[Incompetent]

Some sort of logistics could be good, *if* it is implemented well. If not, it could just be very annoying. (The closest thing we have to a logistical challenge right now is the trade network and pirates, but I don't think many players are fans of the latter.) I think it would be interesting to have some benefits for planets to be self-sufficient, without making specialist planets unviable. It is also kind of weird that in a setting where it takes years to go from one end of your empire to the other with a military or science vessel, pops and leaders can be transported instantly. (This creates the bizarre situation that if you want to bring the captain of a science vessel to a new location within your empire, often the quickest way to get him there is to *build a brand-new science vessel close to the destination* and then teleport him over.)

Migration is a mess, I agree; honestly with the new resettlement rules coming in 2.9, they could probably just do away with the "migration" growth modifier entirely and let the pops move (with some delay while they are "in transit"). As for "pops grow pops", that's exactly what the logistic curve is supposed to model: growth is initially more or less exponential, i.e. growth rate in proportion to the existing population, but then it slows down as capacity constraints kick in.

 

[Olterin]

The same argument could be brought to bear against most strategy games across all genres. There's a degree of abstraction required for the game to not be a massive performance hog, a line Stellaris is already barely straddling (*). From the sound of it, your issue isn't so much that Stellaris isn't a "space strategy game" and more that it isn't a "space strategy simulator game". Difference being that in a simulator, the economy, and most things, would have to account for logistical issues (can anyone say "lag"?) in a not-so-abstract way. I'm not sure it'd provide a meaningful gameplay enhancement relative to the performance drain.

As for "the rest might as well take place on a flat land mass" - what would you change? Almost every bit of sci-fi (space opera, what have you) deals with similar concepts to what we have on the ground, because that's what we know and understand intuitively. To actually represent space, communications would have to have delays to them, the map would have to be three-dimensional (both the starmap and the solar system map) ... and ... I don't even know how much effort would have to go into imagining and designing the political and diplomatic systems and interplay. We don't really have a good reference point of what an empire would look like, politically, if it took several years if not a decade or two to travel from one end to another at the fastest possible speed - this is literally unprecedented in human history. Having an empire grow that big, that diverse, that fast, is a revolutionary development with social and political consequences that aren't remotely being modeled.

That is not what Stellaris (1) is about, though. Maybe a game in the future will deal with all of this more faithfully and accurately, but today we play out our favorite sci-fi and sci-fantasy tropes in this playground.


(*) Yes I know Victoria 2 exists, and as such it is possible to have an economy simulator strategy that doesn't kill performance. I do wish the next Stellaris is closer to vicky2 in terms of how accurate the simulation is, but that's a discussion for another time.

 

[kwanzaabot]

It's in space
And you use strategy

 

[MichaelJanuary]

Could you define what you think a strategy game is?

Nothing you mentioned sounds like a required core component of a strategy game to me.

It's the space immersion part that's problematic for me. And @Olteris probably right that certain aspects would work better in a simulation. Perhaps its the degree of abstraction, and perhaps it's the overall design.

So, minor stuff I can live with.

• Graphics:
  • The galactic map is only pseudo 3d. I get why, and can live with it.
  • The map is not particularly inter-active. Except for moving ships/fleets, it is not really used to present information that is useful to the player. For that, you depend on notifications, the outliner, and various sub-screens or tabs.
  • Note: I am not talking about eye-candy here, but about presentation of information, and ability to directly manage things.
• Socio-Political
  • That there are no Comms techs. Inter stellar communication and its effect on politics should be more significant (courier networks, short range FTL, long range FTL, communication nodes). By extension these would affect ethics drift, culture, unity, loyalty. These are all subjective though, and a lot of it abstracted (to near nothingness). Very minor though.
  • This includes distance from capital models. Ethics, corruption, loyalty, unity should suffer as you move away from the centers of government, in proportion to your communication technology, government systems.
  • Disappointed that more isn't done to model pop conversion, integration, assimilation (influence of factions, impact of geography, influence or proximity of alien factions).

Medium .... I dont like it, but understand.

• The lack of asymmetry (FTL, tech trees, hab). Hyperlanes.
  • All species have the same techs (barring a few modifiers), same tech trees, same FTL systems.
  • The hyperlane model is understandable if a tired concept for games of this type, but its implementation could have been much better.
    • Advancing hyperlane techs merely changes cooldown timers. It doesn't affect the galactic map in any strategic sense.
    • Instead of being able to access new lanes, make longer jumps, construct your own lanes, disrupt enemy hyperlane networks, you are introduced to other tired concepts (wormholes, jump drives) to bypass the hyperlane network.
• The planetary hab model.
  • Different species should require completely different environments (methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, temperature, pressure).
  • Hab is extremely undervalued, and barely affects pop growth, economic productivity.
  • Terraformiing is introduced very late in the game, and by then you already have gene-engineered species for different habs, or gained access to alien species that are better suited. Terraforming is thus a waste of resources in most scenarios, and its impact valuable to only a limited set of scenarios.
• Ships, Fleets, Military Tech.
  • Ship designs, modules, fleet manager. It's mostly weak sauce, buggy, not a lot of diversity or choice. Bigger is always better, and longer range is always better.
  • There is no diversity in ship-building doctrines, technologies. Because the tech tree doesn't offer any significant choices that would limit or tailor your options, everybody converges to the same designs.
  • Ship behavior is "baked in" at construction or refit, and adjusting fleet formations, engagement orders, combat objectives is not evident at all. Fleet combat is a simple slug fest. There is no option to design fleets/ships/orders for last stands, skirmishes, resource raids, blockades, convoy interdiction, holding actions.
• Stellaris economy is entirely resource based.
  • A well developed planet in Stellaris is one that produces gobs of stuff (minerals, energy, research).
  • There is no private sector, no production economy, and production is entirely divorced from your centers of population (global resource model).
  • Instead you have shipyards which can be anywhere in space that magically consume all these resources, regardless whether they have a navigable route to any other part of your empire. (This is a major deviation from just about every other 4X game from civ1, MOO to endless space, where PLANETS (or cities) are the point of production, or factories/orbital shipyards/starbases are tied directly to planets, with the rate of production scaling with infrastructure).
  • The magic shipyards in random locations is immersion breaking for me.

Major stuff.

• The thing that distinguishes SPACE 4X games from other 4X games, is that space itself is a major obstacle.
  • Space is big.
  • Planets are far apart.
  • Inter-Stellar travel is time consuming and expensive.
  • For evidence in Stellaris: Note the brilliant implementation of exploration, anomalies, archeology, colonisation. Note also that throughout the game fleets and ships take months and years to travel significant distances.
  • However, all of this is IGNORED when it comes to social issues, resource management and production.
    • The location of planets within your empire, and their distribution, has ZERO bearing on ethics, factions, resource shortages or excesses, capacity to produce things.
  • The galaxy map is meaningless when it comes to these things.
• Planets are also just modelled poorly.
  • I don't really like the whole districts/buildings model. (that is subjective, i know).
  • The transition from having a poor colony world that is entirely dependent on outside sources, to a self-sustaining planet, to a major contributor to your inter-stellar economy is glossed over, and we just have to assume that it exists somewhere in the lore.
  • This is not a necessary part of a 4X game, but it contributes to a lack of immersion, in developing your planets:
    • Would be nice to go from a simple 'landing pad', to a fully functional 'starport', and eventually to a 'space elevator' or other planetary scale structures.
    • The distinction between rural, urban, orbital infrastructure on planets is entirely headcanon (and only vaguely distinguished in the game as either 'districts' or 'buildings').
• Pops:
  • I dont mind 'pops' as a concept. However, there are some issues with pop growth, migration, resettlement, job allocation, worker classes, species rights that are just all over the place. Its a minefield of random choices that is not clearly illustrated or reported in the game. Ref slaves, robots, domestic and indentured servitude, or grid amalgamation, purge, etc.
  • Robots 'grow' themselves, like biological species. You cant order them in quantities and model as desired, and there are no limits to how large a population they will grow to.
  • All bio-pops have natural limits to growth (housing, amenities, unemployment), but there are NONE for robots. They will go on being assembled forever regardless until you manually stop it. Either, they should be manufactured to order (at a cost), or there should be natural limits to how many droids you can support (a percentage of your bio-pops, or limited by your capacity to service/charge/repair/replace them).
• Outposts, Starbases.
  • I understand the logic of establishing borders and ownership in the game, but it makes no immersive sense.
    • Building ANY infrastructure in a star system should claim it for you (it shouldnt *have* to be an outpost).
    • The first infrastructure in a star system should have a political influence cost to it (logical), but it should SCALE with distance from the nearest inhabited planet, forcing you to develop systems close to inhabited systems first, rather than chaining out randomly into space.
  • Why does your outpost have to be orbiting the star?
  • Why cant you build multiple starbases in a star system?
  • Why cant you build a starbase at the warp lane exit?
  • Why cant i build starbases orbiting planets, or orbiting other stars in binary and trinary star systems?
  • Not to mention that starbases themselves are weak, one dimensional, boring, and dont scale well at all.
• Artificial mechanics like admin cap, fleet capacity, starbase limits, also break immersion for me.

EDIT: Another issue which I have NOT articulated does appear to be under development at the moment. The greatest drawcard of Stellaris is the first phase of the game. The sense of wonder and excitement as you boldly go where your species has not gone before. Exploring, discovering, Solving mysteries. This ends ABRUPTLY when you make contact with your first alien empire. Suddenly, the mystery is gone. You know everything about them, their species, their politics, their star systems, instantly. There is no mystery anymore.

It would be great if the 'mystery' of Space and the 'discovery' element could be extended, through use of diplomats, sensors, scout ships, intelligence agents. A fog of war, both geographically and politically, would be nice.


I'll add more stuff as I can figure out how to articulate it.

EDIT: Basically the single biggest "missing" element in the game is that outside of exploration and colonisation (colony ships), you dont have the impression that you are managing a disparate set of planets separated by dozens of light years, months and years of travel. It has ZERO effect on your economy and your empire management.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

It's in space
And you use strategy

Its strategy. But I wouldn't call it 'space'. That's just cosmetic.

 

[kwanzaabot]

Its strategy. But I wouldn't call it 'space'. That's just cosmetic.

The only thing I'll agree with you on is that it'd be nice if all the stars weren't the exact same distance apart, but ultimately all that would do is increase wait times in a game where you wait a lot. Oh, Alpha Centauri is 24 light-years from your current position? That means it'll take 24 times longer than a star that's only one light-year away. That would not be fun.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

It's all in how its implemented. It doesnt have to revolve around wait times.

E.g, if you were required to build X convoy ships to move resources between planets, the number of ships required could scale with distance, giving you the same throughput, without requiring a wait for the next ship.

 

[NilsFabian]

That there are no Comms techs. Inter stellar communication and its effect on politics should be more significant (courier networks, short range FTL, long range FTL, communication nodes). These are all subjective though.

Thats something I'd love to see but it might be hard to implement while you are playing as the collective mind of your star nation.

Ship designs, modules, fleet manager. It's mostly weak sauce, buggy, not a lot of diversity or choice. Bigger is always better, and longer range is always better.

Buggy I'll give you but why should there be a lot of diversity. Form follows function and there are only limited options of how to build a fighting ship. Plus if you have an interstellar empire it would be smart to have only a limited number of ship types for certain roles so that when you mobilize your fleets there are no big issues with logistics.

Transporting resources and people between planets (even if only inter planetary distances) should be more of a bottleneck. At the least, it should consume a significant portion of your fleet capacity.

I'd guess that this is something the devs also want to do more but so far have found no way to implement it in a way that wouldn't result in complete micromanagement or crush the game at all.

Planets are also just modelled poorly. I dont really like the whole districts/buildings model.

Thats an abstraction and not a far fetched one. When you build colonies as an interstellar empire with meaningfull FTL capabilities it makes sense to specialize the colonies according to your needs and the planets ability. On the planets itself I would assume that you would construct it that way to keep the industry far away from the residential areas. Those districts also might represent spaceborne industry. Zero G forges orbiting your planet.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

Thats an abstraction and not a far fetched one. When you build colonies as an interstellar empire with meaningfull FTL capabilities it makes sense to specialize the colonies according to your needs and the planets ability. On the planets itself I would assume that you would construct it that way to keep the industry far away from the residential areas. Those districts also might represent spaceborne industry. Zero G forges orbiting your planet

I actually try hard to headcanon exactly that .... that 'districts' are planetside and 'buildings' are orbital infrastructure, but the game works hard at breaking that image.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

Thats something I'd love to see but it might be hard to implement while you are playing as the collective mind of your star nation.

Thisbis one that id actually love to see.

If the hive was ruled by a 'queen', then drones on remote planets would be at risk of breaking away to a new queen. But this could be mitigated by techs, new drone types (enforcers), genetics (pheromones, etc).

If the drones have a collective mind that is not embodied by a queen, then this could be modelled through loss of unity, cohesion, and growing too far too fast could see the mind split and form two hives. This could be countered again through some imaginative techs (cybernetic enhancements, FTL comm implants, quantum entanglement organelles).

Either system would serve as a 'sprawl' mechanic for hives without actually having to count planets or districts.

The same or similar would apply to regular forms of government. Distance from empire would lead to disloyalty, ethic divergence, rebellion. Natural rather than artificial sprawl.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

Buggy I'll give you but why should there be a lot of diversity. Form follows function and there are only limited options of how to build a fighting ship. Plus if you have an interstellar empire it would be smart to have only a limited number of ship types for certain roles so that when you mobilize your fleets there are no big issues with logistics.

In general, I'm thinking of things like evasion cap limiting the use of evasive fleets. Long range energy weapons completely dominating the potential short range advantages of kinetic knife fights.

So (in my head) energy weapons are accurate at long ranges with a relatively low drop off rate in damage. Kinetics are extremely inaccurate at long range, but deliver devastating impact. So it would make sense to have a *choice* between a fleet that excels at long range artillery duels or skirmishes, and a fleet that excels at short range furballs.

It would be nice to be able to design ships around that doctrine, to focus on techs that reinforce the doctrine, at the expense of other options. Basically, stellaris doesnt lend itself to this level of strategic choice. Let alone that all fleet battles are the same. There are no raids, skirmishes, holding actions, last stands, etc. Fleet and formation orders barely make any impact.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

Thats an abstraction and not a far fetched one. When you build colonies as an interstellar empire with meaningfull FTL capabilities it makes sense to specialize the colonies according to your needs and the planets ability. O

I would have preferred for this to be something that evolved through the game with technology and infrastructure.

I.e, when you establish your first interstellar colony, it would need to be self sufficient, and would have limited access to resources from home. But as you build up your transport capacity, develop appropriate techs (anti gravity technologies, space elevators, orbital industry, space construction techniques, interstellar freighters) this changes.

As it is, this whole potential area of technology and infrastructure is completely overlooked in the game.

 

[Nokori]

• Outposts, starbases. I understand the logic of establishing borders and ownership in the game, but it makes no immersive sense.

That would really be neat to have neutral planets not belonging to any empire, shared systems where one planet belongst to one empire and the other planet to another or even shared planets with pops on it not under your juristication. It could be implemented by giving planets an autonomy velue, blocking you from certain interactions when to high (can't move pops, build districts, change govenor, build buildings, recruit armys). Also your political system could prevent you from cirtain interactions. A democracy with a laissez-fair majority permits you from building buildings for economic purpose but lets rich pops do it.

 

[MichaelJanuary]

Difference being that in a simulator, the economy, and most things, would have to account for logistical issues (can anyone say "lag"?) in a not-so-abstract way. I'm not sure it'd provide a meaningful gameplay enhancement relative to the performance drain.

As for "the rest might as well take place on a flat land mass" - what would you change? Almost every bit of sci-fi (space opera, what have you) deals with similar concepts to what we have on the ground, because that's what we know and understand intuitively. To actually represent space, communications would have to have delays to them, the map would have to be three-dimensional (both the starmap and the solar system map) ... and ... I don't even know how much effort would have to go into imagining and designing the political and diplomatic systems and interplay. We don't really have a good reference point of what an empire would look like, politically, if it took several years if not a decade or two to travel from one end to another at the fastest possible speed - this is literally unprecedented in human history.

Maybe what im missing is the 'Space empire simulator' part. I dont think it would necessarily involve the degree of lag you suggest, or that it hasn't been done before.

Largely, i would prefer natural systems, rather than artificial limits. Corruption, dissent, etc has been around since Civ2 and Rome1, and served as natural sprawl limitations without needing artificial sprawl counters.

We have seen government models that could work (in theory) such as federal systems, hegemonies, commonwealths, caliphates, where there is basically a degree of decentralization plus some common uniting factors (ethnicity, religion, language, economics, external enemies).

I am of the opinion Stellaris could have done a way better job. But the obvious counter is that maybe Stellaris was never meant to be an empire simulator. Which is disappointing. Maybe the game designers themselves didnt have a clear vision of what it was supposed to be.

 

[FuzzyLogic]

Literally no sci-fi 4x that existed at the time Stellaris was released modeled any of the things you're complaining about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ok, maybe I should elaborate. Stellaris was a welcome new direction in a genre that had become stale after two decades of MOO clones. MOO-nostalgia was so prevalent that it was impossible to think of a space strategy game that wasn't patterned after it, and MOO, in the end, was a glorified worker allocation boardgame with a light combat element.

Stellaris was one of the first games to dicth the boardgame-y approach and try for a richer experience. Is it my "dream game", the one that exists only in my imagination? Well, it comes close, but it is not. Do I think it's a bad game or do I feel betrayed for not aligning 200% with my totally subjective ideas on what a perfect game should be like? Heck no.

 

[Anton1978]

The more features the better.
The transportation problem, it seems to me easy to solve - civil ships.
The mechanics work like those of transport ships.
Created automatically, you don't need to build them.
The capacity of one ship is 1 pop or 1 leader.
If we transfer the leader from point A to point B, then a civil ship with a leader appears near point A, and when approaching point B, the ship disappears, and the leader will be assigned to a new location.
Also with pop, emigrants fly from planet A to planet B.
Destroying a ship with a pop is equivalent to an act of genocide.
Let there be a policy - to shoot civilian ships during the war or not.


Here's to you right away - innocent victims of war - realism.
You can even modify the artificial intelligence so that when the enemy armada enters the system, the pops begin to automatically fly into another system (they are fleeing from the war).
Pirates, monsters, the holy trinity - they automatically attack such ships - an additional reason to fight them.
It shouldn't be technically difficult and it seems to me that it won't overload the computer.

And then you can develop, For example, by falling on a ship with a leader, you can take him prisoner, etc.
Catching pop in space for sale into slavery, etc.

 

[safe-keeper]

Agree fully with the OP. I don't need a full-fledged Stars! logistics system where every planet has its own resource stockpile and you need networks of freighters to ferry minerals to where they're needed, but it would be nice to have some limitations that made you feel like you were the administrator of an empire stretching over many solar systems, light years apart. You could have a per-sector resource stockpile instead of a global stockpile, for example, and have it take time, and require an unobstructed route between the sectors, to transfer resources. Maybe you could even have Hearts of Iron-style convoys - an off-map "resource" that determines how many resources you can move at once, and which could even be destroyed by enemy fleets interdicting convoy routes.

Likewise, a couple of small planets out on the frontier should feel, and play very differently from one right next to your homeworld.

Crusader Kings 2 has the demesne system where you can only rule over so much territory at once, and underlings with free will, making you feel like you're a ruler of a fairly decentralized medieval kingdom, where communication over long distances was time-consuming, and administration of large empires was also difficult, especially without delegating power to local rulers. In Europa Universalis, the different cultures and religions of the people you rule over matters a great deal, and you have a system that lets you decide how much autonomy to give your territories.

Stellaris has lots of unfulfilled potential. As the OP says, it can do a lot more with mechanics to increase immersion and set it apart from other grand strategy titles. Right now, the area where it does this the best is the early exploration stage, where I actually feel like the ruler of an empire setting out to explore the galaxy.

Could you define what you think a strategy game is?

Nothing you mentioned sounds like a required core component of a strategy game to me.

Space strategy game.

Literally no sci-fi 4x that existed at the time Stellaris was released modeled any of the things you're complaining about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Stars! gave every planet its own resource stockpile, so that you actually needed to set up freight routes between your worlds to supply colonies with few resources, and to get resources to your production centres.

 

[LWE]

In Europa Universalis, the different cultures and religions of the people you rule over matters a great deal

That's different Europa Universalis from the one I know.

In any case, these complaints seem to be appropriate to every strategy game from Civ to EU.