So I play this game from the day of release, which is a while, and I play it a lot.
Every once in a while I reboot it to check the new DLCs coming out and how the game changes progress.
Just playing 1000 stars Grand Admiral game, for the maximum contents (20 AI empires, 5 Fallen Empires, 3 Raiders)
150 years in I find myself in a micro-hell, just barely managing 15 fleets and 40 planets.
The automated governor is beyond inept to make any use of the planets I give to the AI if I hope to get any resources out of them.
Each and every thing requires my undivided attention here and there with no way to automate the basics and have fun either conquering everyone or playing political games.
Let's go over the topmost offenders:
1) Outliner
That thing has been there from release, and is clearly outdated. Trying to manage all your stuff from the thin right sidebar with a miniature scroll is beyond abysmal user experience.
At the very least - split farmable Ground Facilities (Planets/Habitats/Ringworlds), Space Installations (Star Bases/Utility Megastructures), Fleets + Armies, and Civilian ships apart into their respective tabs for ease of access to see the lists, and work from there.
Having to scroll entire Outliner to find the new Colony ship or my fleets through all my 40 planets and 20 Star Bases is just an offensive experience. And no, shrinking and expanding accordeon controls do not help it one bit, because then you just hide another information you will miss. Left sidebar is barely used anyway - I literally only use it to click "Situation Log" and "Technology", and rarely sometimes other stuff once in 3 hours (like Policies Species etc). So it is time to actually make it useful? Maybe move the contents back to top (where they were on release, btw), and use sidebars for more pressing content (left sidebar for Planets, right sidebar for Fleets, for example)
I believe the company has enough money from all the DLC shenanigans to afford to hire a proper UI designer and resolve this.
The old Outliner has to go, and the new UI for managing a huge star empire has to come in.
2) Notifications & Popups
Since Stellaris is using gutted CK2 engine.. where are notification settings?
It was a great feature that worked perfectly fine, and allowed player to expressly setup - which notifications he wanted as a popup in his face, which ones he wanted just as a tiny icon reminder on top, and which ones he doesn't give a flying fudge about.
Considering how much stuff is going on around in these sandbox games, it makes sense to filter the information, otherwise it's distracting flood.
The game doesn't bother notifying me that a new Colony ship is ready and needs orders, now removed the anomaly notification popup, so I have to manually find them on the map again. but it does popup in my face that some Prawns in the backwater corner of the galaxy became more Militaristic, like I care.
See, this is why we need those "Notification Settings", and need them badly.
This way the player can define that the event is important and requires attention (e.g. "New building slot available!"), and some events he doesn't care about (some backwater aliens became more Xenophilic of Pedophilic, whatever).
Open Endless Space 2 notification settings and freeze in awe - you can set up each and every event to notify you with a popup or not. You can just enable everything, then disable the unnecessary ones as they come in, and in 10 turns of the game you have perfectly fixed up notifications, that are informative and don't distract you. And that's turn-based game!
Just please get this done, it;s been years of us stuck with 1 notification option in game settings "Display Popups Yes/No". That is just sad for a huge strategy sandbox real-time game.
3) Pop Jobs Interface & Priorities
Once and for all, there is no need to invent bicycle. It's done, it's out there. Let the player manually build a ladder of jobs in the importance order he desires, favoring some jobs and disfavoring others.
The automated job weights are
- Clogging CPU
- Rarely ever fit what the player wants and the planet needs
Try making a simple test - make a species with Intelligent, build a bunch of research labs, hit unhappiness, and build an amenity building. News flash - your pops prefer to stay in research, and will never work amenities. Even manually putting them into amenity jobs, as soon as they see there is a research job available they are better at, they're gone, and your planet is dropping into spiral of unhappiness. So please, let the player decide which jobs go in which order, and be done with it.
That means, when I build a mining colony, and it has a city district, do NOT put pops randomly into Clerk jobs. Put them into mining, because I need minerals, I do not need Clerks.
And while at it, get rid of + - microbuttons, these are just offensive UI elements to manage hundreds of pops. The whole 2.0 update was going on about how cool it is to have very tall worlds, and then you guys put + - button to manage 100 pop jobs? And no, Shift-clicking it doesn't do the trick.
Replace the current + - interface with drag-and-drop where the player can arrange jobs however he sees fit, and the pops fill those jobs in that exact order.
If you are completely out of ideas, look at job management interface in AoW Planetfall, and copy from there.
Player can do amazing things there - can favorite and disfavorite any jobs, and the game will sort the pops in needed order right away.
All done with a few mouse clicks! Literally 1-3 clicks per new colony and I have NEVER to come back and fix what pops are doing what jobs! Compare this to the mind-bogging experience of Stellaris +- buttons.
It's your purchased Paradox company anyway so you can copypaste I guess. Or invite their UI designer and ask him to help. There is no shame in it.
4) Automate Resettlement & Planet Maintenance
There is nothing more annoying and boring than revisiting your shitty Rural worlds and fix the leftovers, resettling overflowing unemployed pops and cleaning trash.
As In Endless Space 2, in the colony interface you simply select another colony to send population to. From now on, excess population will pack up and automatically leave for the other pasture.
No need to manually go over your 50 planets and click Resettle Resettle Resettle
One simple feature shows respect to player and reduces the micro hell.
Just need a feature "Resettle Unemployed pops" on the planet, pick destination planet, done.
And no, it should not cost anything, it's a basic core mechanic to help player reduce the micro hell.
5) Obnoxious Invasion & Warscore Mechanics
Declared war to vassalize an empire. Had to trash both their fleet and their Defensive Pact buddy fleet.
Took over ALL of their space stations. That's it, they literally have no means to make ships and come back, ever.
There is no "Call to War" mechanic so they cannot get help anywhere. They are done. Their capital worlds are taken over.
32% warscore.
Now you require the player to grind each and every of their habitats, planets, whatever. And they spam a lot of those.
Whoever thought this system was good, was wrong. It is not. All it does is annoying the player and forcing him to make repetitive boring grind actions "Land army", "Next shithole", "Land army", "Uhh what was I doing?" "Ah Land Army". All of this is done by clicks in tiny Outliner interface to select your army ships, click planet, invade, next, with constant misclicks here and there. It is beyond abysmal user experience.
Looking at Endless Space 2 (again), they have done with army logistics much more graciously - they got rid of Master of Orion-esque Army/Troop ships, and instead those military ships represent a specific amount of Manpower, which is actually an invasion/troop force. So let's say a Frigate would have some marine troopers, while a Battleship can land a serious ground force with Aircraft/Tanks/Giant Death Robots/whatever.
So getting rid of physical army ships to navigate them all over the place would already help a lot. Right now all they offer is goofy experience when the AI has all his army ships stacked somewhere just to be obliterated by randomly passing hostile fleet, or you literally forgot your army ships somewhere to get popped by AI. It doesn't offer any good experience. Not to mention how many commanders I forgot leading armies after merging, just dying in ground battle when their unit is lost, up to the point that players deem commander leaders completely useless.
- Getting rid of army ships will unclog a lot of CPU for AI management, same as reduce player annoyance micro, it is literally thousands of extra unnecessary army fleets gone from the game to improve performance
- Just make your battle fleets represent specific amount of invasion power, and when your fleet docks the planet and bombing, you can click "Invade" same as before. The power of invading army will depend on your fleet composition (bigger ships carry more advanced armies) and army researches.
- Each fleet now can have 2 leaders in it - an Admiral doing space stuff, and Commander doing ground stuff. Can even combine, whatever.
If you are unwilling to get rid of the army clownfiesta, at the very least some core rules of war have to change.
Same is an AoW Planetfall - losing your Capital World must be GG, no options. war is over. All remaining colonies are thrown into anarchy.
This will require player to think twice about leaving his Capital unguarded and open for backstabs, this will show some serious defense effort at the Capital and so on.
Right now, Capital World doesn't mean shit. "Oh, lost my capital, -10% warscore, because I have 100 more shit worlds, whatever".
At present, after waging just 1 war and having to undergo the obnoxious process of invading each and every world/habitat, looking at another empire to wage war with, I shudder - I don't want this experience. I would rather close Stellaris and play another game, where waging war is more fun. My concept of fun does not include repetitive micromanaging clicking of army fleets to land on every shithole. This is exactly what filmmakers cover under the curtains and say "5 days passed...", when the action is not worth seeing and spending time on.
If they lost their Capital world and their means of fleet production - the war is over, gg it was fun, next.
6) Influence & New Edicts
Cool new edicts. I wish I had Influence to use them.
So much weight is put on influence it is not even fun anymore:
- Build an Outpost? Influence
- Elections? Influence
- Make a Non-aggression/Research/Commercial pact? Influence
- Build any Habitat, Megastructure, including simple Gates (like metro)? Influence, buddy
- Make Claims to go to war? Influence of course
- Need to do a planet decision like Ecumenopolis or even "Stop making robots"? (lol why this is costing me anything, it's a basic game mechanic to reduce micro)? Need influence bro
Anything I have missed? Ah right, every fart in the Galactic Community like veto and proposing new stuff also costs Influence.
Back in a day I was at least able to enable Map the Stars edict, while it was still relevant, and there was something to explore.
Now, I just stare at it 40 years in,. when there are literally no systems to survey.
160 Influence for Map the Stars??? Seriously? That's 3 systems worth.
200 Influence to affect elections? That's absurd amount, when I get +4 per month... I can build a ringworld with that.
Anyway - guys just get someone sit down, play the actual game and figure out the real new Influence pricing. Influence is being taxed ways too heavy with too much put on it, and is a very tight hole to enjoy content through (like new Edicts, for example)
Right now, I consider the entire Edict update to be useless, simply because
- Only 1 edict per time without penalties, without any ability to get more
- Edict gains are simply not worth the Influence costs
- In current meta Influence is more precious than Living Metal and spending it on shit edicts is just a no-no
I believe that is enough for start.
I am done buying new DLC for this game now as I don't really see any progress, and the more content Paradox is slapping on top of Stellaris, it just makes the game less and less enjoyable and more and more micro hellish.
If the developers take it to heart and actually work on reducing the amount of micro hell in Stellaris, it might be worth a shot again.
Meanwhile, I would rather play games that respect their players and try to reduce the amount of micro to minimum (AoW Planetfall, for example)
Cheers,
Asuzu
Edits: Spelling and grammar. English is not my native, sorry.
Every once in a while I reboot it to check the new DLCs coming out and how the game changes progress.
Just playing 1000 stars Grand Admiral game, for the maximum contents (20 AI empires, 5 Fallen Empires, 3 Raiders)
150 years in I find myself in a micro-hell, just barely managing 15 fleets and 40 planets.
The automated governor is beyond inept to make any use of the planets I give to the AI if I hope to get any resources out of them.
Each and every thing requires my undivided attention here and there with no way to automate the basics and have fun either conquering everyone or playing political games.
Let's go over the topmost offenders:
1) Outliner
That thing has been there from release, and is clearly outdated. Trying to manage all your stuff from the thin right sidebar with a miniature scroll is beyond abysmal user experience.
At the very least - split farmable Ground Facilities (Planets/Habitats/Ringworlds), Space Installations (Star Bases/Utility Megastructures), Fleets + Armies, and Civilian ships apart into their respective tabs for ease of access to see the lists, and work from there.
Having to scroll entire Outliner to find the new Colony ship or my fleets through all my 40 planets and 20 Star Bases is just an offensive experience. And no, shrinking and expanding accordeon controls do not help it one bit, because then you just hide another information you will miss. Left sidebar is barely used anyway - I literally only use it to click "Situation Log" and "Technology", and rarely sometimes other stuff once in 3 hours (like Policies Species etc). So it is time to actually make it useful? Maybe move the contents back to top (where they were on release, btw), and use sidebars for more pressing content (left sidebar for Planets, right sidebar for Fleets, for example)
I believe the company has enough money from all the DLC shenanigans to afford to hire a proper UI designer and resolve this.
The old Outliner has to go, and the new UI for managing a huge star empire has to come in.
2) Notifications & Popups
Since Stellaris is using gutted CK2 engine.. where are notification settings?
It was a great feature that worked perfectly fine, and allowed player to expressly setup - which notifications he wanted as a popup in his face, which ones he wanted just as a tiny icon reminder on top, and which ones he doesn't give a flying fudge about.
Considering how much stuff is going on around in these sandbox games, it makes sense to filter the information, otherwise it's distracting flood.
The game doesn't bother notifying me that a new Colony ship is ready and needs orders, now removed the anomaly notification popup, so I have to manually find them on the map again. but it does popup in my face that some Prawns in the backwater corner of the galaxy became more Militaristic, like I care.
See, this is why we need those "Notification Settings", and need them badly.
This way the player can define that the event is important and requires attention (e.g. "New building slot available!"), and some events he doesn't care about (some backwater aliens became more Xenophilic of Pedophilic, whatever).
Open Endless Space 2 notification settings and freeze in awe - you can set up each and every event to notify you with a popup or not. You can just enable everything, then disable the unnecessary ones as they come in, and in 10 turns of the game you have perfectly fixed up notifications, that are informative and don't distract you. And that's turn-based game!
Just please get this done, it;s been years of us stuck with 1 notification option in game settings "Display Popups Yes/No". That is just sad for a huge strategy sandbox real-time game.
3) Pop Jobs Interface & Priorities
Once and for all, there is no need to invent bicycle. It's done, it's out there. Let the player manually build a ladder of jobs in the importance order he desires, favoring some jobs and disfavoring others.
The automated job weights are
- Clogging CPU
- Rarely ever fit what the player wants and the planet needs
Try making a simple test - make a species with Intelligent, build a bunch of research labs, hit unhappiness, and build an amenity building. News flash - your pops prefer to stay in research, and will never work amenities. Even manually putting them into amenity jobs, as soon as they see there is a research job available they are better at, they're gone, and your planet is dropping into spiral of unhappiness. So please, let the player decide which jobs go in which order, and be done with it.
That means, when I build a mining colony, and it has a city district, do NOT put pops randomly into Clerk jobs. Put them into mining, because I need minerals, I do not need Clerks.
And while at it, get rid of + - microbuttons, these are just offensive UI elements to manage hundreds of pops. The whole 2.0 update was going on about how cool it is to have very tall worlds, and then you guys put + - button to manage 100 pop jobs? And no, Shift-clicking it doesn't do the trick.
Replace the current + - interface with drag-and-drop where the player can arrange jobs however he sees fit, and the pops fill those jobs in that exact order.
If you are completely out of ideas, look at job management interface in AoW Planetfall, and copy from there.
Player can do amazing things there - can favorite and disfavorite any jobs, and the game will sort the pops in needed order right away.
All done with a few mouse clicks! Literally 1-3 clicks per new colony and I have NEVER to come back and fix what pops are doing what jobs! Compare this to the mind-bogging experience of Stellaris +- buttons.
It's your purchased Paradox company anyway so you can copypaste I guess. Or invite their UI designer and ask him to help. There is no shame in it.
4) Automate Resettlement & Planet Maintenance
There is nothing more annoying and boring than revisiting your shitty Rural worlds and fix the leftovers, resettling overflowing unemployed pops and cleaning trash.
As In Endless Space 2, in the colony interface you simply select another colony to send population to. From now on, excess population will pack up and automatically leave for the other pasture.
No need to manually go over your 50 planets and click Resettle Resettle Resettle
One simple feature shows respect to player and reduces the micro hell.
Just need a feature "Resettle Unemployed pops" on the planet, pick destination planet, done.
And no, it should not cost anything, it's a basic core mechanic to help player reduce the micro hell.
5) Obnoxious Invasion & Warscore Mechanics
Declared war to vassalize an empire. Had to trash both their fleet and their Defensive Pact buddy fleet.
Took over ALL of their space stations. That's it, they literally have no means to make ships and come back, ever.
There is no "Call to War" mechanic so they cannot get help anywhere. They are done. Their capital worlds are taken over.
32% warscore.
Now you require the player to grind each and every of their habitats, planets, whatever. And they spam a lot of those.
Whoever thought this system was good, was wrong. It is not. All it does is annoying the player and forcing him to make repetitive boring grind actions "Land army", "Next shithole", "Land army", "Uhh what was I doing?" "Ah Land Army". All of this is done by clicks in tiny Outliner interface to select your army ships, click planet, invade, next, with constant misclicks here and there. It is beyond abysmal user experience.
Looking at Endless Space 2 (again), they have done with army logistics much more graciously - they got rid of Master of Orion-esque Army/Troop ships, and instead those military ships represent a specific amount of Manpower, which is actually an invasion/troop force. So let's say a Frigate would have some marine troopers, while a Battleship can land a serious ground force with Aircraft/Tanks/Giant Death Robots/whatever.
So getting rid of physical army ships to navigate them all over the place would already help a lot. Right now all they offer is goofy experience when the AI has all his army ships stacked somewhere just to be obliterated by randomly passing hostile fleet, or you literally forgot your army ships somewhere to get popped by AI. It doesn't offer any good experience. Not to mention how many commanders I forgot leading armies after merging, just dying in ground battle when their unit is lost, up to the point that players deem commander leaders completely useless.
- Getting rid of army ships will unclog a lot of CPU for AI management, same as reduce player annoyance micro, it is literally thousands of extra unnecessary army fleets gone from the game to improve performance
- Just make your battle fleets represent specific amount of invasion power, and when your fleet docks the planet and bombing, you can click "Invade" same as before. The power of invading army will depend on your fleet composition (bigger ships carry more advanced armies) and army researches.
- Each fleet now can have 2 leaders in it - an Admiral doing space stuff, and Commander doing ground stuff. Can even combine, whatever.
If you are unwilling to get rid of the army clownfiesta, at the very least some core rules of war have to change.
Same is an AoW Planetfall - losing your Capital World must be GG, no options. war is over. All remaining colonies are thrown into anarchy.
This will require player to think twice about leaving his Capital unguarded and open for backstabs, this will show some serious defense effort at the Capital and so on.
Right now, Capital World doesn't mean shit. "Oh, lost my capital, -10% warscore, because I have 100 more shit worlds, whatever".
At present, after waging just 1 war and having to undergo the obnoxious process of invading each and every world/habitat, looking at another empire to wage war with, I shudder - I don't want this experience. I would rather close Stellaris and play another game, where waging war is more fun. My concept of fun does not include repetitive micromanaging clicking of army fleets to land on every shithole. This is exactly what filmmakers cover under the curtains and say "5 days passed...", when the action is not worth seeing and spending time on.
If they lost their Capital world and their means of fleet production - the war is over, gg it was fun, next.
6) Influence & New Edicts
Cool new edicts. I wish I had Influence to use them.
So much weight is put on influence it is not even fun anymore:
- Build an Outpost? Influence
- Elections? Influence
- Make a Non-aggression/Research/Commercial pact? Influence
- Build any Habitat, Megastructure, including simple Gates (like metro)? Influence, buddy
- Make Claims to go to war? Influence of course
- Need to do a planet decision like Ecumenopolis or even "Stop making robots"? (lol why this is costing me anything, it's a basic game mechanic to reduce micro)? Need influence bro
Anything I have missed? Ah right, every fart in the Galactic Community like veto and proposing new stuff also costs Influence.
Back in a day I was at least able to enable Map the Stars edict, while it was still relevant, and there was something to explore.
Now, I just stare at it 40 years in,. when there are literally no systems to survey.
160 Influence for Map the Stars??? Seriously? That's 3 systems worth.
200 Influence to affect elections? That's absurd amount, when I get +4 per month... I can build a ringworld with that.
Anyway - guys just get someone sit down, play the actual game and figure out the real new Influence pricing. Influence is being taxed ways too heavy with too much put on it, and is a very tight hole to enjoy content through (like new Edicts, for example)
Right now, I consider the entire Edict update to be useless, simply because
- Only 1 edict per time without penalties, without any ability to get more
- Edict gains are simply not worth the Influence costs
- In current meta Influence is more precious than Living Metal and spending it on shit edicts is just a no-no
I believe that is enough for start.
I am done buying new DLC for this game now as I don't really see any progress, and the more content Paradox is slapping on top of Stellaris, it just makes the game less and less enjoyable and more and more micro hellish.
If the developers take it to heart and actually work on reducing the amount of micro hell in Stellaris, it might be worth a shot again.
Meanwhile, I would rather play games that respect their players and try to reduce the amount of micro to minimum (AoW Planetfall, for example)
Cheers,
Asuzu
Edits: Spelling and grammar. English is not my native, sorry.
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