Tech rushes are so good because

[fourteenfour]

there are just too many bonuses to research and the jobs are the most efficient in game. Really have you sat down and looked it all up? I have, it truly is staggering how easy it is to make a mockery of technology costs and its the cheapest boost to your empire you can perform.


At the empire level there are twenty two bonuses, some replace lesser versions, but the key is you can easily rack up 10, 25, to 50, percent bonus to research at the empire level. Then you compound this with leaders who can stack traits along with a level bonus. Toss in +25% bonus from a trade agreement just for kicks! This all piles on to boosting the base 4/4/4 (12 total) points a single research job provides. Research jobs are incredibly efficient, they output a base of 12 units per job! Oh, throw in stored research and our recently hugely beefed up rewards from anomalies. Stored research can apply an equal amount of research that you generate so it in effect doubles till you run dry.

In many of my games its not uncommon for me to have 50-100% bonus to the technology I am researching, I have been higher and this is just within 50 years of game time!

Example of racking it up. Low effort achievable here as in I am not even trying

• Discovery Tree +10
• Nanites +10
• Administrative AI +5
• Curator +10

Leader stacks, easy mode

• Maniacal +5 or Spark of Genius +10 or Specialized +15
• Level +4 to +8 level II to IV
• Research treaty for technology +25!

Then adding in Store Research! Go team!





While I like using unity for many more items I am wholly against the sprawl mechanics as we see them now. However I am not discussing unity or sprawl in this.

Reigning in tech rushes means starting at the bottom and going up from there.

• Research jobs reduced to +2/+2/+2 (6) before specie modifiers. Much more in line with other jobs on a unit basis
• Leaders gain +1% per level instead of +2
• Traits do not start out out their max, instead they increment as the leader levels
  • Maniacal (any former +5 bonus) is +1 per level
  • Spark of Genius (any former +10) is +2 per level
  • Specialization (any former +15) is +3 per level
  • Could be capped at 5 levels or not. The progression is obvious
• Empire wide bonuses, couple of choices. Current values are +5, +10, +15, and +20
  • Just halve them, rounded down
  • Go more extreme +1, +2, +4, +6
• Stored research instead of applying as equal amount to current research applies at one fourth the rate.

The idea is that we first off reduce just how effective each research job is and then we reduce all the bonuses. Halving the initial research each job provides is big. You could get more extreme and just have research jobs do +1 +1 +1 .

Spoiler: Wiki Resources

Technology - Stellaris Wiki

stellaris.paradoxwikis.com

Leader - Stellaris Wiki

stellaris.paradoxwikis.com

Jobs - Stellaris Wiki

stellaris.paradoxwikis.com

 

[Unseelie]

While I wouldn't mind seeing this done, what I really think we need is a doubling of the value of traditions.

 

[Mcgan]

All of these together might be a bit too much, but I like most of these ideas.

What about the techs that boost the amount of research produced by researcher jobs?
3 times +20% isn't nothing. Unity doesn't get anything like that.

 

[arosenberger14]

I think the critical thing is not so much the base researcher output, but the bonuses you get over time, and how the base tech costs increase with tech tier. You can get the same effect of halving base researcher output by setting tech costs to 2x in the game setup; all it does is make early game research super slow until you hit mid game when things go back to a similar fast pace. If you look at the base tech costs they go from 2500 to 50,000 for repeatables. That's a 20x jump, which if you scale to pops would mean you'd need only a relatively modest ~600 pops by the endgame to match the rate at which you research stuff... and that's without taking into account all the bonuses you get to research throughout the game. Sprawl eats at those margins a bit, but not nearly enough to overcome all the productivity bonuses you get throughout the game.

The easiest way to fix research pacing would be to more aggressively exponentially scale the cost of the T3 and up techs; that way you wouldn't get as quick a jump through the middle of the tech tree, and engame techs would take longer to research than the early ones unless you devote an extremely high percentage of your empire to research.

 

[CptKirby]

Alternatively:

 

[HFY]

Yeah, I mean this is what the default opening tech choices look like for a reason:

One very low-impact way to change the meta would be to crowd the +% research techs into a single tree (probably Society), instead of allowing every tech type to improve itself in parallel.

Or put them in Traditions so you use Tech to boost Unity and you use Unity to boost Tech.

Or just remove them.

 

[grisamentum]

The problem isn't just the Researcher job, the problem is the Research Lab building. A single building that gives all research types makes it too easy to spam the same building and improve all 3 research categories at the same time.

As I outlined here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...h-labs-and-re-do-buildings-generally.1471190/ the solution is to get rid of the Research Lab building and Researcher job type and break them out into several different types of research so that players actually have to make choices about what kind of research to improve, instead of speedrunning their way to battleships + proton launchers + bigger fleet caps.

 

[DC E1G]

While I wouldn't mind seeing this done, what I really think we need is a doubling of the value of traditions.

Personally, I'd rather tech be knocked down a bit in addition to an improvement of traditions. IMO, a lot of the problems with the current economic balance stem from inflation of tech's power over the game's lifespan, and I'm not sure the solution should necessarily be to make traditions OP too.

As others have said, there's just so many ways to increase research speed (including by improving your research speed) and the cost/number of techs has not kept up.

 

[GnoSIS]

"There are just too many bonuses to weapons in Call of Duty and the ammunition are the most efficient in game. Really have you sat down and looked it all up? I have, it truly is staggering how easy it is to make a mockery out of the opponent's armor and its the cheapest way for your character to be effective."

 

[Dragatus]

Jobs that have upkeep to balance out production tend to be easier to make more efficient because bonuses to production don't also increase upkeep.

The baseline balance of a Researcher job is 8, 12 for the research - 4 for the two CGs. +100% production doubles the research to 24, but the upkeep is still valued at 4, so the net value of the job becomes 20. That's a 150% increase.

 

[Lidhuin]

There are several individual technologies that provide more benefit than an entire tradition tree, or even an ascension perk, and they don't exclude you from anything, and are cheaper to obtain in terms of pops & consumer goods. That hasn't changed.

 

[pttaylor]

I think the critical thing is not so much the base researcher output, but the bonuses you get over time, and how the base tech costs increase with tech tier. You can get the same effect of halving base researcher output by setting tech costs to 2x in the game setup; all it does is make early game research super slow until you hit mid game when things go back to a similar fast pace. If you look at the base tech costs they go from 2500 to 50,000 for repeatables. That's a 20x jump, which if you scale to pops would mean you'd need only a relatively modest ~600 pops by the endgame to match the rate at which you research stuff... and that's without taking into account all the bonuses you get to research throughout the game. Sprawl eats at those margins a bit, but not nearly enough to overcome all the productivity bonuses you get throughout the game.

The easiest way to fix research pacing would be to more aggressively exponentially scale the cost of the T3 and up techs; that way you wouldn't get as quick a jump through the middle of the tech tree, and engame techs would take longer to research than the early ones unless you devote an extremely high percentage of your empire to research.

So, the scaling of base tech costs interacts in a really frustrating way with sprawl: because sprawl increases are a % of the base tech cost, the amount that sprawl penalizes you increases as you go up the tech tree. Early game, new pops mean the ability to support more researchers, and thus increase your tech rate even with sprawl penalties. Late-late-game, once you're into repeatable techs, it's seriously difficult for adding a planet full of pops to not actively slow down your research, even if all those pops are doing is researching and making CGs to fuel said research, because the cost of 1 sprawl is as much as a researcher produces (meanwhile the research megastructure costs no sprawl, so a one-system stub of an empire with one of those can research very fast). ((this is based on the old sprawl system before admin cap, but the principle is the same))

This creates perverse game incentives, where the early runaway expansion is also the best way to tech up, and the rubber banding kicks in really hard at the very end when you actually want snowballing to occur and end a drawn-out game

 

[Lidhuin]

So, the scaling of base tech costs interacts in a really frustrating way with sprawl: because sprawl increases are a % of the base tech cost, the amount that sprawl penalizes you increases as you go up the tech tree. Early game, new pops mean the ability to support more researchers, and thus increase your tech rate even with sprawl penalties. Late-late-game, once you're into repeatable techs, it's seriously difficult for adding a planet full of pops to not actively slow down your research, even if all those pops are doing is researching and making CGs to fuel said research, because the cost of 1 sprawl is as much as a researcher produces (meanwhile the research megastructure costs no sprawl, so a one-system stub of an empire with one of those can research very fast). ((this is based on the old sprawl system before admin cap, but the principle is the same))

This creates perverse game incentives, where the early runaway expansion is also the best way to tech up, and the rubber banding kicks in really hard at the very end when you actually want snowballing to occur and end a drawn-out game

Assuming .6 empire sprawl per researcher (would probably end up being less including governors), that means each researcher adds +.06% tech cost in return for 8-12 research points per research tree.

Until you hit 20k research in any individual technology (60k total), a new researcher is always adding at least a little bit if they're 200% efficient (not out of the realm of possibility).

A science nexus provides ~900 research total and you can only have one. It's not nothing, but I'd take the empire with 1600+ researchers/60k total science over the one-system stub of an empire any day of the week, and they'd far outtech the stub too - triple the cost of a new tech, but with 60x the science.

Yeah, the game is over by that point, if not sooner.

 

[Incompetent]

I think the critical thing is not so much the base researcher output, but the bonuses you get over time

This is a key point: it's not the rate at any one time, but the acceleration. You can keep the early game relatively low-tech by setting tech costs high at the start of the game, that's easy; but sooner or later, you will reach a stage of the game where a successful empire is teching up much faster than it did early on and also much faster than other empires. I don't think simply making higher-tier techs more expensive is a good answer on its own, for two reasons:

1. If higher-tier techs become super-expensive but the lower-tier ones stay cheap, that just means you fill out most of the lower-tier tech at an accelerating pace before moving onto higher tiers. This effectively makes choosing which tech to research first less interesting. Also, it only partly blunts the tech power spike because taken collectively the sum of all the T1-T2 techs or T1-T3 techs is already a lot of power compared to no tech. If you really wanted to make tech choices consequential and prevent everyone from getting all the techs, I suppose you could increase cost of tech per existing tech, like traditions; but that has downsides too, like when you acquire a tech by event, or the tech you actually want takes many tries to appear in your hand, and it would be a stiff challenge for the AI especially to program it to pick techs strategically.

2. To some extent, making higher-tier techs more expensive counters the acceleration loop of "more tech -> greater efficiency -> greater proportion of pops can be Researchers -> even more tech". But it doesn't really counter the other major factor, which is blobbing through xeno empires. Once you start blobbing, you can acquire hundreds of pops in each war/integration, way faster than you could grow them yourself, and some of them will make science/unity (or even if they don't, they will make physical resources that free up more of your other pops to make science/unity), so the absolute number of science/unity specialists in your empire suddenly shoots up. I think sprawl (with the right parameters) is a perfectly reasonable way to balance out this phenomenon, so that blobs don't end up being super-advanced on top of the direct material advantages of size. Now some people don't like sprawl, which is fair enough. But I've yet to see a proposal, the OP included, for an "alternative to sprawl" that actually addresses the issue that sprawl addresses. To make it clear, it's not that "tech is too fast" in an absolute sense (which is easy to fix); it's the *relative* advantage blobs have over non-blobs that contributes to snowballing.

A science nexus provides ~900 research total and you can only have one. It's not nothing, but I'd take the empire with 1600+ researchers/60k total science over the one-system stub of an empire any day of the week, and they'd far outtech the stub too - triple the cost of a new tech, but with 60x the science.

Yeah, the game is over by that point, if not sooner.

I'd also add that while the blob empire can only *build* one Science Nexus from scratch, it can conquer any number of them. (Likewise with Dyson Sphere and Matter Decompressor, which indirectly boost science by allowing you to promote hundreds of menial workers.) If other empires are unable to build Science Nexuses, that's just a symptom of their overall weakness; if they can, then some of them will most likely be conquered by the blob anyway because the blob has a crushing advantage in alloy production. So while Megastructures aren't especially rewarding for empires that got big in the pre-Megastructure era and have settled down, they can actually tip the scales even further in favour of empires that blob hard in the mid-to-late game (such as going on a Colossus CB/Become the Crisis rampage as an empire that "made friends and peacefully teched up" in the first half of the game).

 

[Lanferite]

Spoiler: Just sayin

 

[grisamentum]

Spoiler: Just sayin

View attachment 801152

This is definitely goofy, but Erudite isn't what makes tech rushing good. In fact you need the tech rush to get to Erudite early enough that it actually pays off before the end of the game.

 

[Lanferite]

This is definitely goofy, but Erudite isn't what makes tech rushing good. In fact you need the tech rush to get to Erudite early enough that it actually pays off before the end of the game.

My point is
a) Why's there Erudite but no advanced trait specialised towards Unity, or any other particular resource for that matter.
b) Why do all the Erudite leaders get +science of all things? Scientists I get it, but Governor? Ruler?

Also iirc it's the same story for Psionic and Synth traits.

 

[Paul93]

The point in my opinion is that most of these bonuses are stackable and does not prevent you from ALSO taking other bonuses to production, fire rate etc. The philosophy of Stellaris (and other PDX games) is to let players choose nearly any combination of bonuses. Even civics, which taken one-by-one have quite a lot of conditions, tend to have duplicated bonuses. There are too few exclusive perks (and I am using the word "perk" in a wider sense, including species points, civics, ascension perks and so on). Research is maybe the game mechanics where this problem manifest the most.

I see two possibilities in this regard:
(1) Make more things mutually exclusive. Have you chosen the discovery tradition tree? Then you cannot chose the X tree (where X can be the prosperity or the supremacy one);
(2) Adding drawbacks to these choices. Do you want that +10% research speed from Technological Ascendancy? Surely you are ready to pay for it by a -15% reduction in energy income (or a +20% cost in CG for researchers... these are only examples of course).

In general, getting bonuses to research (or to other things) should entail a sort of specialization that leaves you somewhat disadvantaged in other regards.

 

[DeanTheDull]

This is a key point: it's not the rate at any one time, but the acceleration. You can keep the early game relatively low-tech by setting tech costs high at the start of the game, that's easy; but sooner or later, you will reach a stage of the game where a successful empire is teching up much faster than it did early on and also much faster than other empires. I don't think simply making higher-tier techs more expensive is a good answer on its own, for two reasons:

This is all good points, and the acceleration point- aka snowballing- is the thing that unbalances the meta more than anything else. Any restriction or slowdown based on a cost is going to ultimately be easiest to overcome by an empire with greater ability to afford the cost. As pops are the source of nearly all resources, this comes from the empire with the most pops, and the fastest way to get pops is to take pops from someone else.

Aside from sprawl of a restraint measure- something whose value in slowing down power creep gives other chance to also acquire more pops- I've been interested in the prospect of ethic rebellions, where pop ethic-management becomes a core requirement. If pop-acqusition was not sufficient- if you needed pop retention because bad-ethic pops could be either negative influences or actively rebel- that would be a limiting factor on the 'bad' types of wide- hyper-aggressive conquest- by incentivizing ethic management measures and investments to get a reliable economic base and not just a numerically superior one.

Espionage, faction ethics, and unity as a resource are all available tools that could be used to manage... if there was a system that you had to manage.

 

[Lanferite]

I've been interested in the prospect of ethic rebellions, where pop ethic-management becomes a core requirement. If pop-acqusition was not sufficient- if you needed pop retention because bad-ethic pops could be either negative influences or actively rebel- that would be a limiting factor on the 'bad' types of wide- hyper-aggressive conquest- by incentivizing ethic management measures and investments to get a reliable economic base and not just a numerically superior one.

Man it might make sense on paper, but, have you noticed how much of a clusterfuck is species management in this game, and mind you, this is based on much more transparent and straightforward mechanics. Like you know how much of a pain it is to try to actually specialize anything species-wise here. In late'ish game I personally get like a 5 second lag even accessing the species screen, never mind trying to do anything meaningful with THAT interface.

Now with ethics it's the whole another layer of the same, but it lacks existing framework, as in, an interface, but fundametally the involved mechanics are just obscure and too back-ended. I personally don't think I'm terrible at this game but still when I look at "encourage political thought" edict - I can never tell if that would be a negative or positive thing right now. When I look at "governing ethics attraction +X %" - I have no earthly idea how much would it actually yield and in what timeframe. And I'm afraid the same goes for most of the players. I'm thankful that in my current playthrough I didn't have to open factions window for last like 150 ingame years. And you advocate for making this stuff essential to the gameplay? Have mercy pls.

In Endless Space 2 there's similar system, and guess what, it just ends up being confusing and frustrating all the same.